Category Archives: Gary North

He Who Makes the Rules Gets the Gold

Christian Reconstruction, Gary North, Tithing

No doubt you’ve heard the cynic’s version of the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.

This is supposed to have come from a 1967 comic strip by Johnny Hart: The Wizard of Id. 

As a kid, I read The Wizard of Id religiously. The title of today’s post, I think, is a somewhat more biblically-correct rendition of Hart’s humorous turn-of-phrase.  He Who Makes the Rules Gets the Gold.

My version addresses two fundamental questions:

  1. Who makes the rules?
  2. Who owns the gold?

If you’ve read what the Bible says about private property and stewardship vs. ownership, you already know the answer.

For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills.

I know all the fowls of the mountains: and the wild beasts of the field are mine.

If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof.

Psalm 50:10-12

This leads us to installment #4 of my Tithing and the Church project.

Today’s chapter gets into the question of authority, namely, who has the authority to collect the tithe.  It also gets into the clash between authority and autonomy.  Here, too, a connection is made between the practice of mandatory tithing and Christians’ authority (and individual and corporate responsibility) to carry out the Great Commission — which, as Gary North describes it, offers a great “commission” plan to those who are employed in this long-term global enterprise.  (But I don’t want to be a spoiler.  You can read it for yourself. . . .)

2

AUTHORITY AND THE TITHE

          Moreover he [Hezekiah] commanded the people that dwelt in Jerusalem to give the portion of the priests and the Levites, that they might be encouraged in the law of the LORD (II Chron. 31:4).

          Hezekiah understood at least two things about the tithe.  First, as king, he possessed the God-delegated authority to command Israelites to pay their tithes.  Second, the Levites and priests had the God-delegated authority to collect these tithes.  There was not a trace of “moral voluntarism” anywhere in the arrangement.  The tithe in Israel was morally mandatory.

          Was the tithe also legally mandatory?  That is, did church and State possess the authority to impose negative sanctions against those who refused to tithe?  The Mosaic law does not list any.  The history of Israel does not provide cases where such sanctions were imposed.  My conclusion is that the command to tithe that was issued either by priest or king was moral and exemplary rather than judicial.

          The context also makes it clear that under the Mosaic Covenant, when covenant-keepers paid their tithes, God brought great wealth to them in a unique fashion (vv. 5-10).  There is no biblical reason to believe that this system of corporate sanctions has changed in the New Covenant.  Building wealth begins with tithing, and not just tithing as such – the whole tithe delivered to the local church: a single storehouse (Mal. 3:10).  Respect for God requires respect for God’s institutional church.  This means that we must pay our tithes to the local church as a duty.

          Without access to a growing quantity of economic resources, Christians will not be able to extend God’s dominion.  If a person cannot afford to buy or lease the tools of production, he will remain a salaried worker in someone else’s enterprise.  He will remain, economically speaking, a second-class citizen.  So, subordination to the institutional church, manifested by the payment of the tithe, brings the economic means of dominion.  He who is subordinate to God reigns in history.  This is a basic principle of biblical hierarchy: point two of the biblical covenant.1

Tithing and Dominion

          There was a time, over three centuries ago, when the Puritan merchants of London exercised national influence far out of proportion to their small numbers.  They were the English capitalists of the seventeenth century.  They were also the source of almost half of the charitable giving of the nation.  This gave them considerable political influence.  Cromwell’s militarily successful revolution against the crown added to their influence, 1650-1660, but they had not gained this influence militarily; they had gained it economically and charitably, beginning in the.late sixteenth century.2

          In this century, the State has replaced private charity as the primary source of money and support for the poor.  The State is perceived as the primary agency of healing.  For as long as its money holds out – and still buys something – the State will continue to be regarded as the healer of the nation. But this ability to heal rests on political coercion and bureaucratic control.  The State is now reaching the limits of its ability to confiscate the wealth of nations, all over the world.  If its ability to exercise dominion by creating dependence by means of continual grants of money is ever interrupted by economic or other social disruptions, there will be a temporary void in society.  That void will be filled by something.  Authority flows to those who exercise responsibility. Who will that be?

          Who should it be?  Christians.  But Christians are ill-prepared today to exercise such responsibility.  They are themselves dependents on the State. They, too, send their children to public schools, collect Social Security checks, and plan their lives on the assumption that the State will serve as an economic safety net.  The State’s wealth-redistribution system has steadily eliminated competition from private charitable and educational associations.  When the State’s safety net breaks, as it surely will, most Christians will find themselves as economically unprepared as everyone else.  They have been taught to trust that which is inherently untrustworthy: the modern messianic State.  When this trust is finally betrayed, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth in churches, Christian college classrooms, and other supposedly sanctified places.

          In that day, there will be a shift in local and national leadership, as surely as there was during the Great Depression of the 1930’s.  Regarding this coming shift in leadership, the question today is: Who will inherit authority?  The answer is: those who bear the greatest economic responsibility in the reconstruction of the economy.

          Will this be the church? If not, why not? If not, then who?

Redemption: Definitive, Yet Progressive

          The basis of biblical dominion in history is the redemption of the world.  To redeem something is to buy it back.  This process of long-term repurchase began at Calvary.

          At Calvary, Jesus paid God the full redemption price.  He did not pay it to Satan.  Satan had occupied the world only as a squatter occupies it: until the owner comes to evict him.  When Adam fell, he lost tide to everything, including his own life.  God, by grace, granted Adam an extension of his temporal life.  But by “having subordinated himself covenantally to Satan through his act of rebellion, Adam had brought whatever God had “granted to him under the temporary domain of Satan.

          Satan did not gain lawful title over the earth, since Adam had forfeited this title back to God.  Satan has gained administrative control for as long as Adam’s heirs remain alive and also remain under Satan’s covenantal authority.  Satan would have lost this administrative control had God executed Adam in the garden, for Satan’s legal claim was dependent on Adam’s legal claim.  Adam’s claim was null and void except through God’s common grace in history: life, knowledge, time, authority over nature, and capital.3

          Jesus definitively paid God the full redemption price.  This does not authorize His heirs the right to collect immediately on their inheritance.  The world-redemption process is a process.  It is progressive, although grounded legally in ]esus Christ’s definitive act of redemption.  In this sense, world redemption mirrors personal sanctification.  At the moment of his redemption in history, the redeemed person receives by God’s judicial declaration the moral perfection of Christ’s perfect humanity.  But this moral perfection, while definitive and judicially complete, must be developed over time.  Sanctification is progressive: a working out in history of the moral perfection of Christ.4  This is why Paul wrote of the Christian way of life as a race with a prize at the end:

Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain.  And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things.  Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible.  I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air: But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway (I Cor. 9:24-27).

I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.  Let us therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded: and if in any thing ye be otherwise minded, God shall reveal even this unto you (Phil. 3:14-15).

The Greatest Commission System Structure

          God has given to the Church a Great Commission: “And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen” (Matt. 28:18-20).  This commission is well known among Christians.  What is not recognized is the commission system by which the Great Commission is carried out.

          When a company establishes a commission payment system to reward its sales force, it designs it so that the individual salesman has a financial incentive to stay on the road or the phone for long hours.  He is expected to develop continually his powers of persuasion so as to produce more revenue for the company per contact.  The higher the commission, the greater the incentive.  The higher the commission, the more qualified the salesmen who will be attracted to join the sales force.

          The company must balance the rewards offered to salesmen with the rewards offered to other members of the operation: salaried personnel, investors, bankers, and suppliers.  But to maximize the number of sales, there is no doubt that a large commission paid to salesmen is the great motivator.  Some companies may pay as much as 20 percent of gross revenues to the sales force.

          God, the owner of the whole earth, has established the most generous commission structure in history: 90 percent after expenses is retained by the sales force.  Any business that would offer its sales force 90 percent after expenses would attract the most competent salesmen on earth.  The firm would be flooded with applicants for any sales position that might open up.  This is what God offers to His people.  They keep 90 percent; His church receives ten percent; the State is entitled to no more than ten percent (I Sam. 8:15, 17).  But men rebel.  They think this tithe burden is too onerous.  They have been deceived.

The Con Artist

          Satan appears,on the scene and makes a more attractive offer: “Keep it all!”  He can afford to make this offer: he does not own the company.  He is like the con artist who walks into a temporarily empty office and signs up salesmen as if he were the president of the company.  He makes his money on the back end of the transaction when he sends his goons to collect payments from the salesmen.

          The salesmen have kept all the money from their efforts.  The goons then make the salesmen an offer they cannot refuse.  The Mafia calls these goons “enforcers.” Civil government calls them “revenue agents.”  Their purpose in each case is the same: to extract far more than ten percent of net earnings from the naive but now-trapped salesmen.  He who refuses to pay faces unpleasant consequences: broken bones or a bullet in the head (Mafia); fines, tax liens, or jail sentences (civil government).

          The victims went into the deal thinking they could get something for nothing.  They firmly believed that someone would gladly provide them with productive capital and also allow them to keep everything they earned from their own labor.  Any wise man would have spotted the offer as fraudulent as soon as he heard it.  But there are not many wise men in history, at least not so far.  Wide is the gate that beckons the unwise, and they eagerly rush through it.

          So, Satan comes to men with a proposition: “Keep everything you earn.  I have no legal claim on your wealth.”  The second statement is true; he has no legal claim on anything.  The first statement involves making a verbal promise to transfer to man God’s lawful share in the business.  Satan is not in a position to deliver on this promise, but billions of people believe he is.  They believe that God has no legal claim on them.  They also believe that God has no economic claim on them.  They are incorrect on both points.  They will learn this on judgment day.  In the meantime, they bear the economic and civil consequences of having believed a lie.  They pay dearly.

The Wealth of My Hand!

          Men are not content with God’s grant of 90 percent after business expenses.  They see this as an infringement on their property.  They want to keep all of it.  They have not heeded God’s warning to the Israelites of the generation of the conquest of Canaan:

And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth.  But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day (Deut. 8:17-18).

          Men resent God’s demand that they pay Him ten percent.  They do not see themselves as working on commission.  They see themselves as sole owners of the company.  They think the tools of production are the product of their own hands: a combination of land and labor over time.  Men insist on keeping all of the appropriate payments to each of these factors of production: rents, wages, and interest. Educated men today are asked to believe that land and labor arrived by way of eons of cosmic evolution.  Many of them do believe this.  They do not see themselves as indebted to God.  They do not see themselves as God’s sharecroppers.  So, they look at the 90-10 arrangement and do not conclude: “The greatest commission structure in history!”  Instead, they conclude: “God is trying to get into my wallet.”

Who Lawfully Collects the Tithe?

          The civil magistrate collects taxes.  Paul identifies him as God’s minister (Rom. 13:4).  He is collecting taxes in God’s name, whether he names God or not.  God has ordained him.  He is a subordinate to God.  In his capacity as the representative of God to men through the State, he lawfully collects taxes.  Men complain about today’s level of taxation, as well they should – it constitutes tyranny (I Sam. 8:15, 17) – but they rarely rebel.  They do not blame God.  They accept their burden as members of a democratic political order.  They fully understand that they do not possess the authority as individuals to determine where their tax money should go.  They dutifully pay the tax collector.

          Then who lawfully collects the tithe?  The minister of God.  But this minister is not a civil officer; he is an ecclesiastical officer.  He comes as God’s designated, ordained agent and insists on payment.  That is, he should do this.  In fact, he is too timid to do this in our day.  Why?  Because he has adopted – or at least acceded to – a modified view of Satan’s offer: “Pay whatever seems fair to you. God has no legal claim on ten percent after business expenses.”

          This outlook transfers authority over the distribution of the tithe to the tithe-payer.  This transfer of authority is illegitimate for two reasons.  First, the giver defines the tithe’s percentage as he sees fit, but somehow this figure is usually less than ten percent.  Second, he reserves to himself the authority to distribute this tithe to those organizations that he approves of.  This violates God’s system of hierarchical authority.  The tithe-payer assumes that not only does God not have a legal claim to a full ten percent, God has not identified any single organization as the sovereign agent of collection and distribution.  This leaves the tither in control over who should receive his tithe – an unlawful transfer of authority to the autonomous individual.5

A Hole in the Wallet

          Covenant-breaking man affirms his self-professed autonomy by controlling his wallet.  His control over the allocation of his money is the number-one manifestation of his faith.

          Money is the most marketable commodity, economist Ludwig von Mises argued.6  This means that money is the most representative form of wealth.  This is why Jesus warned that men cannot serve two gods, God and mammon (Matt. 6:24).  This is why Paul warned that the love of money is the root of all evil (I Tim. 6:10).  What a man does with his money reveals his priorities.

          Covenant-breaking man’s number-one priority is to affirm his own autonomy without coming under God’s judgment in both history and eternity.  He believes that he has the right to decide what to do with his money.  God tells him he is wrong about this.  God has first claim through His institutional church.  Men in their rebellion do not accept this teaching.  They would prefer to keep 100 percent of a shrinking economic base, which is what God promises they will eventually experience.

          It is not surprising that we find Christians who deny that Haggai’s prophetic warning (Hag. 1:3-11) is still valid under the New Covenant.  Christians still seek to affirm theologies that defend man’s partial autonomy before God.  Anyone who affirms the mandatory tithe has to this extent broken with the covenant-breaking philosophies of his era.  Christians are still so impressed with covenant-breaking philosophies of human autonomy that they have not obeyed God in this area.  They ding to their wallets as tightly as the Israelites of Haggai’s day clung to theirs.

          But they have nevertheless felt guilty about this.  They have therefore sought to justify themselves theologically.  In doing so, they have abandoned the tool of dominion: God’s law.7

To Escape the Obligation

          There are many ways that Christian theologians have sought to escape the cause-and-effect relationship between tithing and wealth described by Malachi.  One way is to apply to the theology of tithing Meredith G. Kline’s theory of cause and effect in the New Covenant era.  Kline denies that in the New Covenant era there is any predictable relationship between covenantal law and economic sanctions.

And meanwhile it [the common grace order] must run its course within the uncertainties of the mutually conditioning principles of common grace and common curse, prosperity and adversity being experienced in a manner largely unpredictable because of the inscrutable sovereignty of the divine will that dispenses them in mysterious ways.8

          Kline self-consciously has abandoned the Mosaic Covenant’s doctrine of covenantal predictability in history.  He has substituted a theory of God’s common-grace inscrutability to mankind in New Covenant history.  Social cause and effect become mysterious from the point of view of biblical revelation.  This theology of mystery, if true, would make biblical social theory impossible.  Christians would then be forced to seek for reliable social theory – assuming that such a theory even exists – in the writings and speculations of covenant-breakers.9  This is exactly what Christians have been doing from the days that Christian apologists began to appeal to Greek philosophy as the foundation of common-ground truths.  It is this quest for common- ground principles of reasoning that Cornelius Van Til rejected as a compromise with the devil.10

          Another way to deny the moral necessity of tithing is to declare, with fundamentalism, “We’re under grace, not law!”  The result of such a universal affirmation is the self-conscious surrender of history to covenant-breakers.  Christians then find themselves under pagan laws and pagan lawyers.11

          A third way is to affirm that God’s Holy Spirit will inform each Christian how much to give.  This opens the Christian to feelings of guilt, either because he thinks he has to give more than the tithe – but exactly how much? – or because he gives less and worries about it.  Guilt produces doubt.  Guilt and doubt are not conducive to entrepreneurship and economic growth. 12

          A fourth approach is to affirm the mandatory tithe, but then deny that the institutional church has any legal claim on it.  This leaves the tither in control over the allocation of his tithe.  This is an affirmation of man’s autonomy, but in the name of covenantal faithfulness.13

          All four approaches deny God’s warning through Malachi.  All four seek to evade man’s responsibility to bring one-tenth of his increase to the single storehouse, the house of God.

Conclusion

          The leadership of Christians in society depends on their covenantal faithfulness.  The leadership of individual Christians within the institutional church also depends on their covenantal faithfulness.  If God still brings predictable corporate sanctions – both positive and negative – in history in terms of His law, as the Old Testament affirms repeatedly, then in order for men to prosper, they must obey God’s Bible-revealed laws.  The failure of Christians to exercise dominion in any era of history is closely associated with their unwillingness to preach God’s law and obey it.  To put it concretely, it is associated with their unwillingness to bring all of their tithes to God’s single storehouse: the local church.

          It is unlikely that individual Christians will be able to exercise leadership outside of the institutional churches if Christians remain economically second-class citizens, struggling to keep up economically with covenant-breakers.  It is time for pastors to start preaching the biblically mandatory nature of the tithe if they want the church to lead in society.  Unfortunately, not many pastors really want this added responsibility for themselves and their congregations.  So, they continue to nag members for “donations.”  But unlike the State’s appeal for larger “contributions,”14 churches threaten no negative sanctions against members who refuse to donate.  Preaching apart from institutional sanctions becomes either nagging or cheerleading. The Bible does not set forth a leadership program through either approach.

******************

Footnotes:

1. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 2.

2. W. K. Jordan has discussed the influence of Puritan businessmen in his book, Philanthropy in England, 1480-1660 (Russell Sage Foundation, 1959).

3. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), ch. 1.

4. Gary North, Unconditional Surrender: God’s Program for Victory (3rd ed.; ‘lYler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988), pp. 66-72.

5. See Part 2, below.

6. Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, [1912] 1953), pp. 32-33.

7. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).

8. Meredith G. Kline, “Comments on the Old-New Error,” Westminster Theological Journal, XLI (Fall 1978), p. 184.

9. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Chris- tian Economics, 1990), ch. 7.

10. Cornelius Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1969).

11. GaryNorth, Political Polytheism:The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler,Texas:Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), Part 3.

12. David Chilton, Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt-Manipulators: A Biblical Response to Ronald J. Sider (5th ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).

13. See Part 2, below.

14. In the U.S., the compulsory tax (FICA) on salaries that is used to pay those people who receive Federal pensions (Social Security benefits) is called a contribution.

The Buck Stops Here… Or, At Least It Should

Christian Reconstruction, Gary North, Tithing

This is Part 3 of my Tithing and the Church project.

Gary North’s 1994 book was a wake-up call to me on this all-important subject of tithing.  I had first read parts of it some 15-20 years ago when I saw the PDF edition he had posted online.

I will be honest, it was a jarring experience.  (Of course, reading almost anything Gary North writes can be a jarring experience!)

It was a major course correction.  Why?  Because, just a few years prior, I had bought into the very appealing idea of the “sovereignty of the tither.”  A lot of Christians have bought into this idea.  “I control the purse strings.”  I liked that.  What self-respecting Christian wouldn’t?  After all, as a born-again, Spirit-led, “covenant-keeping,” “Bible-believing” follower of Christ, I was therefore entitled to be the chief decision-maker as far as how to allocate “my” tithe money the way I saw fit.

What were the criteria?  Only one: wherever I thought (or felt) that God’s law-word was being most faithfully practiced (or preached)–according to my humble opinion and based on my finely-tuned and unimpeachable personal-experience-based perception–by whatever church, charity or non-profit organization that I felt was worthy of my money, that is where I would send my check.  (I wrote more checks in those days.)

Lo and behold, wonder of wonders, this resulted in only a fraction of my tithe going to a local church.  (From time to time, this might even be the one I was attending — assuming that the pastor and his ministry were up to my lofty biblical standards!)

But more often than not, the lion’s share of my “ten percent” — or whatever New Testament percentage I deemed appropriate — went to non-church and other organizational entities which I felt were doing “the Lord’s work.”  My definition of it.

However,… once I got a hold of Gary’s book — or, at least, once I got to reading the electronic, onscreen, non-physical version of the book — my tither’s sense of sovereign superiority quickly evaporated, along with the self-appointed, self-centered practice that went with it: Outcome-Based Tithe Administration.

Here, in this series, I am now giving you the same opportunity that I had 15-20 years ago: to come face to face with a digital, onscreen, non-physical version of Gary North’s trenchant and tenacious argument that, according to God’s covenant and the uniform teaching of Scripture, your tithe belongs in one storehouse: the institutional church.

Last time, I posted the Introduction to Part I of Tithing and the Church.

Today, I am posting Chapter 1: Sovereignty and the Tithe.

Here it is…

1

SOVEREIGNTY AND THE TITHE

       Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the LORD of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it (Mal. 3:10).

       One storehouse, one tithe: this is the heart of the matter.  The day that covenant-keeping men multiply storehouses for God’s tithe is the day they begin to lose the blessings of God in history.  Why?  Because the existence of many storehouses reveals that men no longer believe that there is a single, sovereign, God-authorized collector of the tithe: the institutional church.  Their tithes are broken up into a series of offerings; then these offerings are perceived as morally voluntary; then this moral voluntarism transfers visible sovereignty to the donor: he who pays the piper calls the tune.

       The sovereignty of the donor over his tithe is an illusion.  This form of sovereignty cannot remain with the individual.  Individuals possess delegated sovereignty, but they cannot retain it if they rebel against the ultimate Sovereign, God.  They refuse to tithe; then the State’s tax collector steps in and imposes compulsion.  The State increasingly calls the tunes.

Voluntarism vs. Sovereignty

       The modern church is consistent.  It does not preach its own lawful delegated sovereignty because it does not preach the absolute sovereignty of God.  It does not preach the economic mark of this delegated sovereignty – the morally mandatory tithe – because it does not preach the morally mandatory law of God.  By dismissing three-quarters of the Bible as “God’s Word, emeritus,” the church has cut its own purse strings.

       When the church teaches that God has no legal claims on modern man’s institutions – pluralism 1 – it places itself under another god with another law.  God is presented as if He had no legal claims on modern man.  “God loves you, and has a wonderful plan for your life” has been substituted for “God claims you, and has placed you under an eternal bond, which you have broken.”  The doctrine of a claims-less God has financial consequences for the churches, just as it does for the people in them who refuse to pay: wallets with holes.

       Then came the word of the LORD by Haggai the prophet, saying, Is it time for you, 0 ye, to dwell in your celled houses, and this house lie waste? Ye have sown much, and bring in little; ye eat, but ye have not enough; ye drink, but ye are not filled with drink; ye clothe you, but there is none warm; and he that earneth wages earneth wages to put it into a bag with holes (Hag. 1:3-6).

          This warning is easily dismissed today as “Old Testament stuff.” Non-judicial preaching has presented the church as a strictly voluntary institution, contractual rather than covenantal: just one more voluntary institution among many. Such preaching regards the communion table as it regards biblical law: an occasional ritual for remembrance’s sake only.  The church is barely distinguished theologically from a non-profit social club.  It is not perceived as sovereign.

       There is very little sense of the judicial presence of God anywhere in modern church liturgy.  Men may sing, ”All hail the power of Jesus’ name; let angels prostrate fall,” but neither angels nor the power of Jesus’ name are taken seriously.  In liberal churches, such realities are seen, at best, as non-historical (Barthianism); at worst, as mythical (Bultmanism).

The institutional church manifests God’s moral and judicial standard for the world,2 just as Israel manifested His standard under the Mosaic covenant.  This, too, is not believed by the modern church.  We find that there is no sense of the judicial presence of God in the civil courtroom, the voting booth, and on inauguration day.  The following phrases are mere formalities: “So help me, God” (courtroom oath), “In God we trust” (slogan on u.s. money), and “God bless you all” (tagged onto the end of televised speeches by American Presidents).  Invoking God’s name has become a mere convention.

The Judicial Marks of Sovereignty: Oath and Sanction

       The presence of a self-maledictory oath is the judicial mark of covenantal sovereignty.  Only three institutions lawfully can require such an oath: church, State, and family.3  Such an oath implicitly or explicitly calls down God’s negative sanctions on the person who breaks the conditions of the oath.  These sanctions are historical, although few Christians believe this, despite Paul’s warning regarding the misuse of the church covenant’s oath-renewal ceremony: the Lord’s Supper.

Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body. For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep. For if we would judge our- selves, we should not be judged. But when we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world (I Cor. 11:27-32).

          Self-judgment, institutional judgment, and God’s judgment: all take place in history.  But the modern church has doubts about God’s predictable sanctions in history.  Most Christians do not expect to experience God’s positive covenantal sanctions in history.  The next step is obvious: to lose faith in meaningful historical progress.  Here is the origin of pessimillennialism’s lack of confidence in the work of the church, the effects of the gospel, and the future of Christianity.4

Without the oath and its associated sanctions, the church is not legally distinguishable from any other oathless, voluntary institution.  This skepticism regarding the church’s lawfully delegated sovereignty has spread to another covenantal, oath-bound institution: the family.  Today, the oath that creates a new family is undermined by a judicial monstrosity: no-fault divorce.  Only one oath-bound institution is still taken seriously, because of the sanctions attached to the oath: the State.  The rise of modern statism has been accompanied by a decline of the institutional church and a decline of the family.

Which oath does God understand as central in society?  The church’s oath.  Why?  Because only the church survives the final judgment.  It alone extends into eternity (Rev. 21:1-2).  Only the church has been assigned the task of baptizing whole nations in Christ’s name (Matt. 28:18-20).  Baptism is a church monopoly.

Today, this view of the centrality of the church and its sacraments is not widely shared.  Liberals affirm the centrality of the State.  Conservatives affirm the centrality of the family.  Both views are at war against the plain teaching of Jesus.

       And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fallon the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are ofmore value than many sparrows. Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven. Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy ofme: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me (Matt. 10:28-37).

Family Values and God’s Sanctions

          “Family values.”  Everywhere we turn, we hear American conservatives proclaiming family values.  Fund-raising mailing list empires have been built on family values.  Politicians are supposed to profess family values, and all of them do.

But a question arises: Which kind of family values?  How about Islam’s family values?  How about defending chastity the Islamic way?  The family gets together and executes the unmarried daughter after she has delivered the baby.  Not the right approach?  But these are surely family values.  Are you against family values?5

We are all for family values.  No doubt about it.  Show me the politician who stands up and says: “Basically, I’m all for adultery and abortion.”  Not many, right?  But how do they vote?  How do they live their lives?  As people who are unafraid of God’s negative sanctions in history.  And why shouldn’t they be unafraid?  The modern church teaches that there are no covenantally predictable corporate sanctions in history.6

          Christians have accepted this equation: original sin minus God’s historical sanctions plus God’s common grace = legitimate civil jurisprudence.  All the weeping and wailing and direct-mail solicitations concerning the breakdown of family values will change nothing until Christians at last admit that their view of God’s historical sanctions is essentially the same as covenant-breaking, late-twentieth-century humanist man’s.  The argument is over the degree to which the State’s negative sanctions should be allowed by modern democracies to deviate from the Old Testament’s negative sanctions.  Modern man has decided: there should be very few overlapping sanctions.  No-fault divorce, no-fault abortion, and no-fault adultery are basic tenets of belief on Wall Street, Main Street, and Capitol Hill: (1) “If it feels good, do it.” (2) “If it leads to morning sickness, kill it.”

Then there are the economic considerations: (1) “If it ever gets born, someone must pay for it.” (2) “If the parent can’t pay for it, the government will.”  Therefore, “Balance the family budget: kill the unborn” soon becomes: “Balance the government’s budget: kill the unborn.”

The covenant-breaking State and the covenant-breaking family are common allies against the church whenever the church preaches God’s law.  But the church no longer preaches God’s law.  So, the covenant-breaking State and the covenant-breaking family assume that society can safely. ignore the covenant-ignoring church.  Everyone ignores God’s warning:

          Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 5:19)

He Who Holds the Hammer

          Neither the morally mandatory tithe nor God’s negative sanctions in history: here is the message of the modern evangelical church.  No mandatory tithe, reduced positive sanctions in history: this conclusion is the result of such preaching.  Because the church will not impose negative sanctions.against members who refuse to tithe – the loss of voting membership7 – it finds itself less capable of bringing a crucial positive sanction in society: charity.  The local church buys a debt-encumbered piece of land, builds a debt- encumbered building, and pays a debt-encumbered pastor.  The moment it pays off one building, it builds another.  Fund-raising in American evangelical churches today is heavily dependent on building programs.  Modern churches have an edifice complex.  What most do not have are charitable ministries.

There is a legitimate division of labor in society.  There are many things that the church cannot do well – running a Christian school, grades K-12, comes to mind, or running a crisis pregnancy center, or running a drug-rehabilitation center (a basic need in any society where the State runs the schools).  The church should support Christian agencies that can do these things well.  These agencies, to the extent that they are dependent on the money provided by the churches, will then reflect the standards of the churches.  Why?  Because of the fear of negative sanctions: the churches’ refusal to write more checks.

Churches today write checks mainly to bankers.  The bankers have the negative sanction: no payment, no church building.  They, not the churches, “hold the hammer.”  Then the local government finds that it can disrupt the flow of funds by revoking a church’s property tax exemption.  There are now two hammers.  Then the Federal government threatens to revoke a church’s tax-exempt status.  There are now three hammers.

          Where is the churches’ hammer?  In heaven.  But churches insist that God does not bring predictable negative sanctions in history.  His hammer is exclusively post-historical, they preach.  In short, the church offers no threat of a hammer in the modern world, which does not acknowledge God or eternity.  Or, as a pair of famous political theorists have put it:

       And Pharaoh said, Who is the LORD, that I should obey his voice to let Israel go? I know not the LORD, neither will I let Israel go (Ex. 5:2).

Now if ye be ready that at what time ye hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer, and all kinds of music, ye fall down and worship the image which I have made; well: but if ye worship not, ye shall be cast the same hour into the midst of a burning fiery furnace; and who is that God that shall deliver you out of my hands? (Dan. 3:15).

          He who holds the largest hammer gets paid first.  The church preaches that it holds no earthly hammer at all.  The church therefore gets the leftovers: after personal and family taxes; after personal and family debt payments; and after food, clothing, college expenses, and entertainment.

If Not Tithes, Then Offerings

          The church, burdened with debt, denying its possession of meaningful sanctions, comes to its members and pleads: “Do what the Spirit leads you to do.”  But what the Spirit apparently leads them to do is less – far, far less – than He required from God’s Old Covenant people.  There is no denomination in the United States that collects anything approaching half a tithe from its members.

          Old Covenant people were spiritual children, we are assured.  This is why God gave them so many laws.  He told them exactly what not to do.  But we are adults.  No one tells us what to do or not to do (not counting the State, of course).  We must respond as adults do.  We must sacrifice.  That we sacrifice economically at less than half of the required rate of sacrifice of Old Covenant children is of course beside the point.  After all, they were a rural, tribal people.  We are urban globalists, about to enter a stupendous New World Order.  Should we expect the laws of such a primitive people to serve us well today?  Of course not.  We’re all adults here.  Taxpaying adults.  The church deserves ten percent of our income?  Primitive!  Childish!

What should we give the local church?  Not tithes and offerings, surely.  Just offerings.  The size of these offerings is exclusively our decision.  So is the recipient.  Sovereignty belongs to us.  We the people impose the sanctions around here (not counting the State, of course).  We the people giveth, and we also taketh away.  Blessed be the name of the people.  We administer the oath.  We baptize the church.  Shape up, church!

So, the church’s officers come before the people mainly as representatives of the people.  They beg in the name of God, but collect in the name of the. people.  They are then sent back to God, offerings in hand.  There is hierarchy here: the people tell the church, as God’s agent, what they are willing to pay.

Modern Christians come before God and remind Him: “Not a cent more, mind You!  You should be grateful for whatever You get.  Don’t pull any of that fire and brimstone rhetoric on us!  That’s Old Testament stuff.  We don’t take kindly to it.  We can walk across the street and join another church, You know.  It needs our money.  It will be glad to get us.  This is a buyers’ market, Old Fellow.  We can shop around.  This is a free market system.  We’re price sensitive.  We’ll take the best package deal offered by one of Your churches.  There are so few of us these days.  It’s a declining market.  This makes us valued customers.”

(People ask me: What does it matter which eschatology a person holds?  I will tell you.  Postmillennialists are not persuaded that the present “down market” in the number of converts is permanent; pessimiIIennialists are persuaded.  This means that their eschatology reinforces “buyers’ market” mentality.  It also affects their churches’ discipline: gutting it.)

          There was a time, three centuries ago, when Christians believed that there are only three ways out of the church: death, excommunication, and letter of transfer.  They no longer do. Excommunication is old fashioned.  Letters of transfer only carry weight when receiving churches sanction them, rejecting the visitors’ request for membership, if only for the sake of creating respect for their own letters of transfer.  But in a buyers’ market for voluntary donations, churches are rarely choosy.  They have become beggars. Beggars can’t be choosers.

Conclusion

          The churches no longer hold the hammer.  They dropped it over a century ago.  Why?  Because they applied the philosophy of nominalism to the church itself: a world of contracts, not binding covenants under God.  When Holy Communion became in most Protestants’ thinking a mere memorial, the church covenant became a contract in their thinking.

The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is no longer taken seriously.  While the following development may not be predictable in every instance, it is familiar enough to be considered highly probable.  When weekly communion goes to monthly communion, and monthly communion goes to quarterly communion, and grape juice is substituted for wine, tithes become offerings.  Nominalism undermines tithing because nominalism undermines men’s fear of church sanctions: faith in God’s predictable covenantal sanctions in history whenever church and State fail to enforce His law by means of the law’s mandated sanctions.

When the churches stopped preaching the mandatory tithe, the State adapted the idea and multiplied by four: taxes.

Endnotes:

1. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989).

2. Gary North, Healer of the Nations: Biblical Blueprints for International Relations (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987), Introduction.

3. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 4.

4. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Chris- tian Economics, 1990), chaps. 3, 4, 7, 8, 9.

5. In November, 1993, a new movie was released: Addams Family Values. The Addams family is a comedy family of bizarre sadists and masochists.

6. North, Millennialism and Social Theory, ch. 7.

7. See Chapter 3.

Next time: Chapter 2, Authority and the Tithe

VIDEO: How to Understand Gary North

Gary North, Joel McDurmon

GaryNorthatMises“Understand Gary North?”

Sounds like a pretty tall order

Not really.

Not if you understand, first, the men who influenced Dr. North early in his Christian, post-graduate academic life.

Then (and only then), can you begin to understand what makes him tick.  You will also, then, begin to understand what makes him tap: tap millions and millions of keystrokes over his half-century, contrarian career as a writer and speaker, to produce dozens of books, large and small, plus big, fat commentaries (economic) on the books of the Bible, plus newsletters and many thousands of articles written day after day after day, on everything from money to “millennialism and social theory,” all from the perspective of what the Bible and the historic, orthodox Reformed Christian faith have to say about all of these things.

No problem.

You start with John Murray, venerable professor at Westminster Seminary for nearly four decades (1930-1966), whose classes on ethics, systematic theology and the book of Romans served as an exegetical and eschatological wake up call to a young Gary North.

Then you add the uncompromising Christian apologetics philosophy of Cornelius Van Til, who unapologetically held court at Westminster Seminary for 43 years (before retiring in 1973).

Toss in a mind for truth, and a heart for God and His Word, and, presto.

Instant paradigm shift!

Hmm.  A Scotsman and a Dutchman…

No wonder Gary North ended up Reformed and Presbyterian!

Anyway, here is Dr. Joel McDurmon, son-in-law to the curmudgeonly co-founder of the Christian Reconstruction movement, speaking about the things (and people), that massively shaped the thinking and theology of his famous (infamous) father-in-law.

Of course, there were other men whose work and writings informed and profoundly influenced Dr. North’s developing views.  Conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet, under whom he studied while obtaining his master’s and Ph D. degrees at the University of California-Riverside.   And ultimately, R.J. Rushdoony, the man who finally launched Gary’s fully-integrated biblical perspective into a permanent Reconstructionist orbit — and the man who, likewise, ultimately became his father-in-law.

Covenantal history repeats itself.

This talk was given in early 2016 at Branch of Hope Church (OPC) in Torrance, California.

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And Now a Word About the Church’s (Least) Favorite Subject: TITHING

Gary North, Tithing

TithesLet me ask you, what is your opinion of tithing?

Is it part of “Old Testament” religion?  No longer binding on Christians?

Is it a pretty good idea… as long as you can afford it?

Does it really have to be ten percent? (Or is setting a percentage for giving “legalism?”)

I’ll tell you this much.  If you want to get Christians arguing about money and especially about tithing, talk about whether or not the practice of giving ten percent (minimum) of their net income or net profits to the local church where they worship is a mandatory part of their religious faith which Christ did not annul or discontinue or eradicate with his coming and his death, resurrection and ascension ushering in the New Covenant, or whether “tithing” is simply a handy term we use in New Testament times to describe our giving at church, regardless of the amount.

Such a discussion will separate the theological men from the epistemological boys.

“We’re not under law but under grace!”  “No law but love!”

Well, Jesus said, if you love me, keep my commandments…

So, is tithing still commanded?

That is the question addressed head on by Dr. Gary North in his 1994 book, Tithing and the Church.

Note: this is not a new book.  It was published more than 20 years ago.  Yet its message is just as vital and as relevant as ever — written on a topic that North believed was so urgent and fundamental and critical not only for the long-term success of the church, but also for the long-term survival of it, that he wrote this at the beginning:

Because of the importance I place on the question of tithing to the local church, I hereby place the entire contents of Tithing and the Church into the public domain.  Anyone may reproduce all or any part of this book without permission from the author or the original publisher.

That’s how seriously he takes this!

He has not changed his views.  In fact, he expanded on this subject later on when he wrote and published a followup title, The Covenantal Tithe.

Financing the Kingdom of God

Giving to support the institutional church is only a part of God’s overall plan for funding his kingdom.  The other primary institutions involved are also included: state and family.  Yet, as Gary argues, the preeminent authority for collecting and expending funds for the preaching of the gospel, the administration of the sacraments, the worship of the saints, and cradle-to-grave ministering to the spiritual and (in the case of qualifying widows) certain of the material needs of Christ’s body and that of the local community and society at large, and for fostering the overall “healing of the nations,” has been delegated to the church.

To do all of this requires money.  A steady, reliable, predictable supply of it.

The main question asked by Christians is, “How much should I give” to support all this?

The answer is best found by the inquiring mind through a thoughtful reading of Tithing and the Church.

(Then later, The Covenantal Tithe.)

Since Gary explicitly states that his former book is essentially FREE for anyone to read and share due to the crucial importance of the subject, I’ve decided to oblige not only by posting a link to the book below, but also by posting portions of it here in a series of articles upcoming.

So let’s get started!

Step one: download and read the book by clicking here: Tithing and The Church

Step two: do what it says.

Think of the possibilities for expansion of the kingdom of God when his people decide to withhold no more than ninety percent of what they earn as their commission for being his agents of change in the world!

“Where Do I Start My Reconstruction Study?”

Christian Reconstruction, Gary North, Kenneth Gentry

The Greatness of the Great CommissionThat was the question posed recently by a subscriber to Gary North’s website who posted it on a discussion forum board.

Where, indeed!

If you were to ask me where to start your study of Christian Reconstruction, I would have sent you to a handful of titles by Rushdoony and by Dr. North, followed by Chilton, DeMar and a few others.  All classics, all worthy of your attention, and all written some 20-40 years ago — during the Golden Age of Reconstructionist literature!

With his characteristic economy of verbiage, Dr. North replied only with a link to the Free Books section of his site, to the page for Dr. Kenneth L. Gentry Jr.’s seminal work, The Greatness of the Great Commission: The Christian Enterprise in a Fallen World.

A salutary choice!  And an intriguing one…

Why not a title like, Christian Reconstruction: What It Is, What It Isn’t?  Why not Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law?  Why not North’s Backward, Christian Soldiers (An Action Manual for Christian Reconstruction)?

I’ll tell you why.

Because those books (and many others written in the same vein) — as critically important as they are to a right understanding of the underlying tenets and theology of the “movement” — only address aspects of Christian Reconstruction.  The prominent (controversial) elements of it.  Practical applications of it.  Arguments for and against it.

Dr. Gentry’s Greatness of the Great Commission addresses something much more fundamental.

It addresses the biblical basis for it.  Which is exactly where one should begin.

Christian Reconstruction, after all, presupposes the continuing validity and scriptural authority of Christ’s mandate in the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18-20).  What separates it from the standard evangelical (pietistic) understanding is that it recognizes (and presupposes) the comprehensive nature of the Great Commission.

The Smallness of Evangelicalism’s Great Commission

Dr. North writes in the Foreword:

Having brought people into the kingdom of God through conversion, God then asks them to begin to make a difference in their world. He does not mean that they should spend day and night passing out tracts or the equivalent thereof; He means that they should reform their lives, their families, and their daily walk before Him and men. Evangelism means teaching people to obey God’s law, through the empowering of God’s Holy Spirit. Evangelism means obedience.

And that is the case that Dr. Gentry makes.  Christian Reconstruction is based on obedience to (and, by God’s grace, the Holy-Spirit-led fulfillment of) the Great Commission.  Bringing all nations into lawful obedience to Christ their King.

North reminds us:

This is why the Great Commission was given: to enable mankind to return to faithful service under God and over the creation. God’s salvation brings us back to the original task: to exercise dominion to the glory of God, in terms of His Bible-revealed law.

Not at all what most evangelical (and Reformed) churches preach on the “Great Commission”!

Nevertheless, to understand what Christian Reconstruction is really all about, one must see it in its proper context, i.e., its biblical context, as being the church’s “marching orders” given to her by Christ Jesus her commander-in-chief, who has commissioned His people (the church militant) to carry them out–and has promised historical success in their mission.  Without this crucial, scriptural context as its foundation, Christian Reconstruction is little more than an aberrant form of “baptized activism,” theological and political extremism, and just plain WEIRD!

I am glad this particular book was recommended as the best place to start.

It is also a great place to return to.

The Greatness of the Great Commission reminds us all — including those of us who have been enlisted in the Lord’s army for quite some time — why we’re doing this.

Out of loving obedience (John 14:15).  For the glory of God.  “For Christ’s crown and covenant.”

Dr. Gentry puts it all in perspective in the opening pages of chapter 1, tying the Great Commission to the original Creation Mandate found in the book of Genesis:

At death, all men enter the spiritual world, the eternal realm (either heaven or hell). But prior to our arrival in the eternal state, all men live before God in the material world, which He has created for His own glory, as the place of man’s habitation.  The Great Commission necessarily speaks both to the present state (by giving our duty in the material world) and to the eternal state (by showing the means of our entry into heaven). In other words, it speaks to issues regarding body and soul.

Both of the foundation stones for our study of the Great Commission are found in Genesis. In fact, the very foundations of all of reality, revelation, and redemption are laid in the book of Genesis, which makes that book of primary significance to the Christian faith.

From there, he proceeds on a marvelous, exegetical journey through the Scriptures!

If you haven’t read (or would like to read again) Dr. Kenneth Gentry’s excellent book, then start (or continue) your study right here:

Download the book for free!

Happy (blessed) reading.

You Can Lead a Horse to (Reconstructionist) Water, But You Can’t Make Him THINK It

Christian Reconstruction, Dispensationalism, Eschatology, Gary North, Postmillennialism, Premillennialism

Boys Pushing & Pulling Stubborn Mule

Someone on Gary North’s discussion forums this past week posted that he had recently “converted” to Christian Reconstructionism from premillennial dispensationalism.  This, of course, now makes him a contrarian in almost every sense of the word.  He said he is now the only member of his circle of family and friends to hold this position theologically and eschatologically.

His dilemma (and his question) is this: how to persuade members of his family and at least some of his friends that their position is wrong and his position is right?  Ah, yes…

“How to Lose Friends and INFURIATE People!”

Hmmm.  Sounds like a similar dilemma and question when one becomes a new, evangelically-born Christian.  Suddenly, you have (by God’s grace) awakened from a deep spiritual slumber.  You’ve been raised from the dead and rescued from certain everlasting damnation, and given new life and a new purpose.  You feel (and think) like a new man.  That’s because you are.  You know you have a truth that is THE truth (and not just “your” truth.)  The Gospel becomes like a fire shut up in your bones. You can’t keep it to yourself.  You have to tell others.  You want to tell EVERYBODY within earshot.  JESUS is LORD and Savior and King!  Believe in Him and be saved, too. Have peace with God, forgiveness of sins, everlasting life and joy and fellowship with all the redeemed in Christ and joy and peace and radiant and abundant personal fulfillment in spite of your evergreen and enduring Adamic affinities in this life, and so much more.

Who wouldn’t want that?

Well, my fellow Calvinistic, sovereign-election-embracing, total-depravity-acknowledging Christian, not everybody!

In the same way that non-Christians whom God has not been pleased to grant an irresistible attraction to the Gospel of grace in Christ are not all that interested or enthused by your new-found, let-me-tell-you-all-about-what-God-did-for-me-through-His-Son-Jesus “fanaticism,” likewise, non-Reconstructionists, whom God has not been pleased to grant — well, anyway — who are not only not interested in your new-found, “unorthodox,” borderline-heretical, overly optimistic, evangelically-incorrect belief system and worldview, they are incensed by it.

You have gone to the dark side.  You have defected from the safe haven of Rapture-and-tribulation-focused, eschatologically emasculated, piously pessimistic, conservative, culturally-defeatist, evangelical Christianity.

In other words, you’ve been a BAD boy!

At least, that’s how it looks when they are in the majority and you are in the minority — a teensy-weensy (but slowly growing) minority.  Their sense of validation and biblical superiority is based solely on the fact that they outnumber you.  Their favorite Bible teachers and preachers all teach some form of pietism-premillennialism-dispensationalism.  All the Christian radio and TV stations they tune into teach it. Probably, their pastors all teach and preach it.  Therefore, most (if not all) of their Christian friends — and relatives — believe it.  Therefore, it MUST be true.

For the most part, folks who hold to dispensationalism do so because that’s been the prevailing alternative to the anemic amillennialism of most reformed, liturgical protestant and Roman Catholic churches.

Regardless of what tradition you came out of, when you become a “Bible-believing” conservative evangelical or mainline pentecostal committed to biblical inerrancy, premillennial dispensationalism is pretty much what you are expected to believe — otherwise, you’re a LIBERAL!

And even if you’re a dedicated, conservative Calvinist, chances are you’ve shed dispensationalism and adopted a more robust covenantalism, but you have still retained the pessimistic eschatology of premillennialism (i.e., Satan reigns now, Jesus will reign later).

The Question

Anyway, here is the question, verbatim, posted by this person:

I was recently “converted” to the reconstructionist/postmillennial view of Scriptures. I am the only only person in my family who holds this viewpoint. All of my family and Christian fellowship from the past are the dispensational types. For the most part they are all heavily invested into thinking about the “end times.”

I am not really one who likes to debate and argue, but at the same time, I do not like seeing them being affected by this subtle (or sometimes not so subtle) worldview of defeat. Most of them are just “hunkering down” and waiting for Christ to return. They have no ambitions for productivity. They wouldn’t say that, but that’s how they live.

What are some good ways to be an influence on my family and friends in trying to help them see the hope that is in the Reconstructionist view of scripture and life? What are some good questions to ask to get them thinking about their assumptions?

The Answer

Here is Gary’s answer.  Pay close attention to the action steps prescribed here.  They can be applied to virtually any situation where you hold to a certain set of beliefs and the majority of people around you hold to another.  He does not say to marshall your forces to do intellectual and rhetorical battle with your ideological (but not spiritual) foes.  Rather, he says, put your theology where your mouth is.  That includes your eschatology.  Live it out so that others — especially the ones you’re trying to persuade and hoping to convince — can and WILL see the real, visible difference that it makes.

Hunkering down is the preferred way of life for the vast majority of people. This will not change. It’s Pareto’s law: the ineffective 80%.

You perceive that their eschatology is a root cause of their lack of initiative. But is it? It may be the other way around. They are just normal people, hunkered down, and their eschatology comforts them. It tells them that this is all they should expect. You want to take this excuse away from them. You will encounter resistance. If you are not rich or famous, they will say to themselves: “What does he know?” What is your answer?

So, the best way to handle this is by word and deed.

First, achieve some obvious success.

Second, produce materials that show how you did it. This includes your views on eschatology. Write a short a book on eschatology and success. Explain why eschatology does not promote or justify a lack of success. Aim this book at somebody who is about 15 years old. Do not target your relatives. Your relatives do not want to hear it. Your relatives do not want to be reminded by you that they are underachievers due to their eschatology. Publish this book by print-on-demand.

Third, produce a series of video lessons that could be used in a Sunday school. Explain your position. Post these on YouTube. I recommend a 12-week series of lessons, each about 25 minutes long. Use a screencast program to do it, with a presentation graphics program such as the one in Libre Office. Buy a good lapel microphone. Buy a good webcam for $70 or so.

Fourth, set up a WordPress.com site. Post the videos on the site as embeds.

This way, when somebody asks you what you believe, hand him a book, and then hand him a short link created by Bitly.com or TinyURL.com that takes the person to your video series on eschatology. If the person is interested, he can find out what you believe at his own pace. He can listen, review it, or ignore it. He does not have to listen to you tell him face to face.

He listens to you teaching teenage kids, which is a completely different positioning. He does not feel threatened. You are not targeting him because he is a failure. You are targeting young people to help them not become failures. The positioning is completely different. Everybody wants kids to be successful. It is just that few people want to pay the price personally to be successful and to be a role model for kids. He expects his own kids to do what he has not done, despite the fact that he has taught his kids erroneously.

If you are positioning the materials to help teenagers do better in their lives, it is very difficult for anyone to criticize you. Ignore your relatives. Why? Because they surely ignore you. Treat them in exactly the same way. Target a completely different audience, and then, if a few of your relatives are curious about what you have been doing, you can hand them the book and a link to your blog site, which has your YouTube videos embedded in it.

Again, there’s no strategy of full-spectrum theological dominance here.  Just a practical program of, “Don’t tell me, show me!”

To subscribe to Gary North’s website, click HERE!)

Forum question and answer reprinted by permission.

Reconstructionism vs. Dispensationalism: 25 Years Later, the Debate Still Hinges on the Role and Responsibility of Christians, Not the Return of Jesus

Christian Reconstruction, Ethics, Gary DeMar, Gary North, Postmillennialism, Premillennialism, Social Theory

88 Reasons

Younger Christians may not remember this, but 25 years ago, in 1988, millions of Bible-believing Christians all over the world were anxiously awaiting and breathlessly watching for that glorious event to take place, in which the hopes and dreams of generations of believers would be fully realized and instantly confirmed and consummated in the physical, earthly return of our Lord Jesus Christ at the moment of the “catching away” of His bride into the clouds of the air in a biblically predicted event known as “The Rapture.”

I was one of those anxiously awaiting, breathlessly watching Christians that year.

And when 1988 came and went, and I was still here — and Jesus wasn’t — I became even MORE anxious and breathless!

Talk about not getting what you wanted on Christmas morning.

Talk about disappointment and disillusionment.  Our Deliverer was a no-show.  And, here we all were — breathless, anxious and now demoralized Christians — still stuck in our day jobs, still stuck with the world’s problems to solve and Satan’s wickedness (and our own sinfulness) to contend with.

In other words, same old same old!

But the next 2-3 years were a time of transition and reexamination for me.  Reexamining my theology, my eschatology, and my underdeveloped biblical worldview.  Providentially, that was also the time during which I discovered R. J. Rushdoony, Dr. Gary North, Calvinism, the Reformed faith and Christian Reconstructionism.

The more I read and learned and developed my newly-emerging, Calvinist Christian Reconstructionist biblical worldview, the less relevant and less biblical I saw the doctrine of an imminent Rapture and imminent, literal, physical return of Jesus to set up his earthly, millennial Kingdom (with bureaucratic headquarters in Jerusalem) really was.

I moved on and left it behind.

Fast forward.  Yesterday, Gary North published an article asking the question: “Whatever Happened to the Rapture?”

It reminded me of the bigger question: whatever happened to Christians rebuilding and redeeming civilizations and cultures and preparing them for the return of their Savior-King, instead of abandoning civilization and preparing themselves for “stand-by” status on the next flight to heaven?

That article commemorates the 25th anniversary of a debate Gary had, along with Gary DeMar, against Dave Hunt and Tommy Ice — two well-known figures in the world of evangelical pop prophecy and Dispensationalism during the 1980s — on the subject of Christian Reconstruction.

Earlier this year, North and DeMar sat down for a followup video discussion of that debate and of the debate that is still going on about what Christians should be doing in this world while Jesus reigns from heaven and before His return.

Their discussion is not even about eschatology per se– the last days and end times — as you might expect.  It is more about, as they emphatically point out, ETHICS and ACTION.  How Christians can and should be applying their faith in the various areas of education, politics, economics, religion and the family, etc..  Eschatology may have been the “hook” that North and DeMar used to launch and frame the debate, but it was never the crux or essence of it.

Their concern is and has always been about the practical application and implementation of the Christian faith, not theoretical, hermeneutic speculation and rhetorical argument.

Watch the discussion here (opens a new window).

The original debate is here:

The hair has changed. The issues have not!

The Rebuilding of Western Civilization Just Got a Whole Lot Easier, Faster, Cheaper and Better–and Therefore More Likely to Happen SOONER Rather Than Later!

Academic Freedom, Bojidar Marinov, Christian Reconstruction, Digital Education, Education, Gary North, Homeschooling, Khan Academy, Learning, Liberty, Ron Paul, Timothy Terrell, Tom Woods

The announcement today by Dr. Gary North of the Ron Paul Curriculum — roll-out scheduled for Fall 2013 — is big news.  REALLY big news.  It should give statists, socialists, academic leftists and other social and cultural miscreants reason to fear and tremble.

Ron_Paul

We’re not talking about a mere educational innovation here.  This is a REVOLUTION in the making!

This will, if it is successful, spur an ongoing cultural and social reconfiguration of every institution in society — a total transformation of civil, political, ecclesiastical and family life as we know it — the likes of which none of us has ever seen before.

Are you ready for a restoration of liberty, constitutional government, free enterprise/free-market (“Austrian”) economics, a “non-humanist” renaissance in literature, learning, the arts and sciences, a peaceful, well-informed rolling back of tyranny, poverty, ignorance, illiteracy and their attendant evils?

And, if all goes well, given enough time, eventually, who knows, maybe even a restoration and flourishing of a true and vibrant biblical Christendom around the world?

“Christendom restored.”  That has a nice ring to it!

But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.  The breaking news of this intellectual watershed event is enough to buoy us up for the moment with substantive hope for the future of humanity.

The fact that the convergence of digital technology and academic mastery have brought about this breakthrough in the delivery of education — instantaneous, “eternal” (the Internet is forever), global, and both free and cheap to the next generation of learners — is a marvel to behold.

So, let’s behold it together.

Here, in this four-and-a-half-minute video, the curriculum’s lead developer, Dr. Gary North, gives a detailed description and overview of what the program has to offer the academic buying public in terms of its “USP” — Unique Schooling Proposition — and it is unique!

You can read the complete description and summary article on the program, published today, here.

I browsed the Ron Paul Curriculum website.  There is a page where the course instructors are introduced. Wow!

Can you imagine having a super-heavyweight in the liberty community like Tom Woods teaching you history? Or a well–known and respected academic quantity like Timothy Terrell teaching you economics?  Or, how about this… a steely, take-no-prisoners, Bulgarian master of Christian missions and all things theological like Bojidar Marinov teaching you math!  For a rock-bottom price like this?

I can’t either.

There is also a page written by the former Congressman, Dr. Paul, entitled in no uncertain terms, “This Site is Phase 2 of My Revolution: Beyond Politics.”  He makes no bones about his intentions of reclaiming education: “I believe homeschooling is the wave of the future.”  http://www.ronpaulcurriculum.com/public/118.cfm  (Understatement. It is a tsunami!)

Until the official launch of the program on Sept. 2, 2013, Dr. North is offering a “how-to” course to help you prepare for and maximize the benefits of the curriculum:

You can access the High School Preparation course here.

This is truly amazing.  If you have been following the progress, success and steady inroads the digital, online (and FREE!) education juggernaut has been making within the academic world during the last few years, you know what a momentous occasion this is.  We already know from the gigantic success of Khan Academy that the “self-taught” web-based video model works. And we know from the popularity of the free college lectures and courses offered by M.I.T. and Harvard that this model works.  It works because it’s actually not the student teaching himself.  It’s the student learning independently at his own pace from a master teacher. In this case, he is learning from a bevy of master teachers: the best of the best — specialists in their field.  And he can review and rewind, fast forward and skip over material to his heart’s (and mind’s) content.  He is also learning from his peers through student-led forums and discussions.  This is not re-inventing the wheel or flooding the market with cheap educational “alternatives.”  (Or, maybe it is!)  It is iron sharpening iron. Skilled craftsmen forging and shaping steel.  Gold and silver being purified and refined.

But enough with the metallic metaphors.

This development is a phenomenal one.  Another nail has just been driven into the atheist-humanist, anti-Christian, anti-liberty academic cartel’s coffin.  The handwriting is on the wall — or on the touchscreen.  As the foundations of a monopolistic, bureaucratic, statist education system continue to crack and crumble, a freshly-laid, superior superstructure of technology-based, liberty-and-free-market-driven education and intellectual development, advancement and enhancement is taking its place.  September 2nd can’t get here fast enough.  Let there be a renewal of liberty and learning and a revival in the theology of Christian excellence in all things.  Let the reconstruction of Western Civilization begin!

What Do Ethics, Eschatology and Economic Progress Have in Common? Gary North Says: Plenty!

Austrian Economics, Christian Reconstruction, Economics, Gary North, Mises Institute

In a room full of scholars and economic specialists last week, Dr. Gary North gave a one-hour lecture at the 2013 Austrian Economics Research Conference, that parted the curtain on a bombshell thesis he offered in order to explain (or try to explain) the modern phenomenon of continous, compound economic growth, which inexplicably began in the Western world around 1800 and has continued unabated since then, and thus answer the unanswerable question (also the title of his speech), “How Come We’re So Rich?

I say bombshell because, in an economic school of thought that is heavily populated by atheists and anarchist-leaning libertarians, that’s exactly what it is.

Not to say that anybody in the room was surprised necessarily by Dr. North’s connecting the causational dots in his admittedly unproven theory regarding the unexpected onset of long-term economic progress and radical social change during the last two centuries.  He is, after all, the author of multitudes of books, articles, essays, tomes and commentaries spanning five decades, dealing with economic, social and historical issues from an explicitly biblical, presuppositional, Reformed/Calvinistic Christian perspective.

This is huge.

Not dry-as-dust intellectually huge.  But paradigm-shifting, preconceived-notion-challenging, random-walk-theory-demolishing, economic-myth-busting huge.

North is unique in his historical analysis because it is, in reality, a theological-historical-biblical analysis.  In Austrian, as well as in non-Austrian (anti-Austrian) circles, nobody does it better.

He alludes to the uniqueness of the uniqueness of his thesis during the final part of his lecture — namely, that a sea change in ethics, beginning in the 17th century, coincided with a sea change in eschatology at the same time to begin creating a slow and steady, compounding increase in economic output and economic growth throughout the developing world, starting with northwest Europe — specifically the British Isles — and spreading almost immediately to the United States.

But why?

That’s the $64 trillion dollar question.  One thing is for sure, according to North.  It took from the time of Moses and the Book of Deuteronomy to the time of the battle-weary, ready-for-a-new-and-profitable-adventure Dutch Calvinists of the early 17th century for, (a), the pursuit of personal wealth and profit and material gain — entrepreneurship — to be considered a legitimate (ethical) one for man, even Christian man, and, (b), the prevailing world-and-life view and outlook with regard to the future — especially with regard to the progress and success of the Kingdom of God on earth prior to the Lord’s return — to become decidedly optimistic: postmillennialism.

He says that modern capitalism, the basic concept behind Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Mises’s principle of corporate economic prosperity flowing from individual prosperity through the pursuit of “self-interest” in serving customers in a free marketplace, is a secularized version of the biblical-covenantal principle of corporate prosperity flowing from individual ethical obedience in the pursuit of prosperity and wealth in society for the service of the kingdom of God.

Not your garden-variety evangelical message of pietistic, premillennial poverty for God’s people!

No doubt, some in the audience took exception with his theological explanation (hypothesis) for the reasons behind the unremitting advances and successes and progress of the modern world, both in the economic and social order.  But, all were forced to admit to the fact that, to date, no one — North’s main point — has been able to offer a satisfactory explanation, economic or otherwise, for this radical transformation taking place, when it did, how it did, why it did, where it did and to whom it did.

Those of us who embrace the optimistic eschatology he spoke of, as well as the Scripture’s ethical endorsement of entrepreneurship and individual enterprise in the earthly economy of man for the service of the Kingdom of God, won’t find it hard to appreciate the mystery and majesty of the question, and the richness of the historical insights, riveting vignettes and solid theological perspectives offered by Dr. North, evinced masterfully in his speech at Mises.

A tour de force by the professor of Christian Reconstruction (and conscientious statesman of Austrian economics). Worth watching… twice!…

The Libertarian Theology of Rushdoony and the Christian Reconstruction Movement

Christian Reconstruction, Gary North, R.J. Rushdoony, Reconstructionism, Theonomy

R. J. Rushdoony

Here is an essay that Gary North says offers an accurate assessment of the origins and development of the Christian Reconstruction movement and its theological (and political) principles.

It was written in 2007 by a Ph.D. candidate at Ohio State University, Michael J. McVicar (posted in his blog, June 2012).  Neither a “hit piece” nor a ringing endorsement.  But, I am warning you!  It paints a rather stark (yet relatively bias-free, though it’s a little prickly towards the Tyler, Texas side of the ledger) picture of the major players — Rousas J. Rushdoony and Gary North — as well as other key figures who helped shape and define the movement, how it came into being, how it ultimately came to split into disparate camps, and how the movement, in McVicar’s opinion, fares “today” (2007).

Now, this is not a “decline and fall” kind of an article.  It is more of an academic — and critical — summary of a very broad and deep intellectual and theological school of thought which, while it initially launched from a single port, has now — almost because of rather than in spite of the rifts and disputes of its leaders — sailed far and wide and has carried its “Christian libertarian” message to lands more distant and in ways far different from what its founders may have originally intended or anticipated.

For those of you who embrace the biblical-theological-eschatological message of Christian Reconstruction (and even if you don’t!), this article may serve to “connect the dots” and fill in the timeline of your understanding a little bit better with “the good, the bad and the ugly” of how we got here, where we came from, where we’re going and where we stand as a movement.

If anything, it shows the human side of fallible but gifted men who have played strategic, providential roles in moving the certain advancement of the kingdom of God forward to the “next level” of integration and transformation.

My main criticism is that it portrays Rushdoony’s objective (and by extension, the objective of his colleagues) as that of founding a “theocratic America” rather than fostering a theonomic, self-governing, self-consciously biblical Christianity, both in America and around the world.  And regarding Gary North, well, once you get used to his in-your-face analysis and “acrid prose,” his writing becomes music to your ears!

(Compare this with an alternate assessment (“Christian Reconstruction is alive and well”) written from a pastor’s perspective, that is more recent (and more brief), which I comment on here.)

————————————————-

The Libertarian Theocrats

By Michael J. McVicar, Fall 2007

In their struggle to understand George W. Bush, some liberal intellectuals have looked to the writings of Rousas John Rushdoony, the Armenian-American minister whose championing of a theocratic America influenced some of the nooks and crannies of the Christian Right during its rise to prominence. For example Mark Crispin Miller, in his frontal assault on George W. Bush’s response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks,1 charges that Bush not only acted unconstitutionally, but in his religious imagery echoed the infiltration of Rushdoony’s ideas into his Administration (and the Republican Party at large). Miller interprets Rushdoony’s theology as a call for Christians to take “dominion” over all aspects of the federal government and replace it with a theocracy.2 “With their eyes on the future, those [Rushdoony followers] at work on forging an all-Christian USA are overjoyed that Bush is president, for they correctly see the regime’s imposition on the people as itself a signal victory for their movement.”3

But a spokesman for the think tank Rushdoony founded told me Miller is wrong (Rushdoony himself died in 2001). Registering disgust, Chris Ortiz of the Chalcedon Foundation in Vallecito, California, explained that Christian Reconstructionists, as they call themselves, think the war in Iraq is both immoral and ungodly. Not only are a good many stridently critical of the Bush administration, Ortiz said, he agreed with Miller’s indictment of Bush, which he heard during a recent radio interview. At best, some Reconstructionists might see Bush as a well-intentioned fool, Ortiz told me. Many see him as a manipulative politician who snowballed the American people into supporting his disastrous presidency.

Those casually familiar with Rushdoony and Christian Reconstruction may find Ortiz’s comments befuddling since a recent spat of popular books like Miller’s Cruel and Unusual have argued the exact opposite, identifying Rushdoony and his followers as allies of the Bush administration. Ortiz surely wants to distance himself from a failing president, but his remarks also reveal a Reconstructionist distaste for the hard, government-centered politics that brought Christian conservatives into the corridors of Beltway power.

Since the movement’s emergence in the mid-1960s, Christian Reconstruction has always been a little different from other factions of American conservatism. Not surprisingly, the movement wins attention for Rushdoony’s call for the eventual end of democracy in favor of a Christian theocracy, and his insistence that a “godly order” would enforce the death penalty for homosexuals and those who worship false idols.4 But Christian Reconstructionists insist that they have always been uncomfortable with authoritarian institutions of political power because, unlike Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, Rushdoony wedded his rigid theological perspective with a libertarian perspective that looked outside the boundaries of popular conservatism for answers to the problems facing the United States.

“Christian Libertarians”

At first glance, the phrase “Christian libertarian” seems a contradiction, especially when one applies it to Dominionists – as the full range of those calling for a Christian nation are called – and Christian Reconstructionists. It is true that today a secular – and in some cases rabidly atheistic – tendency dominates libertarianism. But this has not always been the case.

During the 1930s, a wide variety of business, intellectual, and religious leaders banded together to attack Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. Those who emphasized the sovereignty of the individual citizen, resistance to a centralized bureaucracy, and the benefits of unfettered free market capitalism eventually coalesced into the libertarian movement that we know today. For a brief period into the 1940s, these anti-New Deal forces formed an alliance with Protestant religious leaders determined to resist “socialistic” tendencies within the church.5 While this cooperation was short-lived, it had a profound impact on the contemporary Christian Right.

The chief target of these economically conservative evangelical clergymen was the Social Gospel, a wide-ranging theological and social movement rooted in the late 19th century whose champions sought to fight poverty and improve the conditions of America’s poorest using the government to regulate market forces. The Social Gospelers pulled together across denominational lines to advocate for a heightened awareness of labor conditions in the country. But the movement had a theological side; its clergy tended to emphasize the corporate, collective nature of salvation. Moreover, many were willing to embrace evolutionary theory as a means of explaining human origins. Such a naturalistic perspective led to a willingness to see human beings as the product of their material and social environment.

Like many in the Progressive Era, the reform-minded period before World War I, the Social Gospelers believed that legislation and government regulation could change Americans for the better by changing the social environment in which they lived. By focusing attention on the social context that drives individuals to sin, the social gospel seemed to downplay the individual, embodied experience of salvation that American evangelicals have traditionally sought.6 Not surprisingly, many prosperous American churchgoers found the emphasis on economic justice over the saving of souls to be yet another expression of the “socialistic” threat to the American way of life.

While the social gospel lost much of its impulse during the economic boom following the war, popular interest in the movement reignited during the Great Depression of the 1930s. To resist this renewed influence – and defend capitalism – the alliance between business and religious leaders sought to reemphasize individual spiritual regeneration and to downplay the effects of social constraints on individual choices.

In 1935, Rev. James Fifield of Chicago formed Mobilization for Spiritual Ideals to address these concerns. Popularly known as Spiritual Mobilization, Fifield’s operation earned the fiscal support of such right-wing philanthropists as J. Howard Pew of Sun Oil, Jasper Crane of DuPont, and B.E. Hutchinson of Chrysler. Facing the daunting task of resisting nearly five decades of entrenched liberal Protestant teaching and the harsh reality of the Depression, Fifield recruited preachers and laymen eager to resist the massive redistribution of wealth envisioned by President Roosevelt. His appeal was simplistic but effective. American clergymen needed to start preaching the Eighth Commandment: “Thou shalt not steal.” In this, the shortest commandment, Fifield and his followers believed they had found the biblical basis for private property and a limit to the government’s ability to redistribute wealth, tax, and otherwise impede commerce.7

In order to undermine government-sponsored economic redistribution, the ministers and laymen Fifield hired focused on the spiritual causes of poverty rather than the social concerns of the Social Gospelers. The New Deal and the conflicts with the Nazis and Soviets were manifestations of humankind’s rejection of God’s divinity for that of a centralized bureaucracy. An all-powerful bureaucracy, they warned, usurped the “Christian principle of love” with the “collectivist principle of compulsion.”8 Beginning in 1949, the Christ-centered free market ideals of Spiritual Mobilization reached nearly fifty thousand pastors and ministers via the organization’s publication, Faith and Freedom.9 With the rhetorical flare of such libertarian luminaries as the Congregationalist minister Edmund A. Opitz, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, and the anarchist Murray Rothbard, Faith and Freedom moved many clergymen to embrace its anti-tax, non-interventionist, anti-statist economic model.

In his Faith and Freedom articles, Opitz formulated a systematic theology in support of capitalism, merging economic responsibility with individual salvation to form a “libertarian theology of freedom.”10 In assessing the threat of communism and fascism, Opitz argued that the solution was not collective political action. Instead, he noted that the “crisis is in man himself, in each individual regardless of his occupation, education, or nationality.”11Jesus’ Good News was that “the Kingdom of God is within you,” making every man’s salvation an internalized, personal matter. In Opitz’s reading, Jesus’ gospel becomes the basis for a radical individualism that “was the foundation upon which this [American] republic was established.”12

By the mid-1950s, prominent secular libertarian organizations like the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI) began to supplant Spiritual Mobilization’s influence in libertarian circles. In fact, many of Faith and Freedom‘s regular contributors like Opitz and Rothbard13 left Spiritual Mobilization and began writing for FEE’s publication, The Freeman. Further, Ayn Rand’s atheistic Objectivism pulled many libertarians away from the Christian ideals of Spiritual Mobilization.

While secular libertarianism triumphed, the remnants of its Christian heritage persisted among a small cadre of thinkers and activists who were reluctant to completely jettison Christ from the economy. Spiritual Mobilization helped a generation of theologically and economically conservative clergy find an alternative to the Social Gospel, New Deal, and communism that resonated with their traditional values, pro-business sympathies, and Christian faith. Faith and Freedom encouraged clergymen to see government as a problem, not a solution. The solution wasn’t to take over the government; it was to replace it with something radically different.

The Libertarian Theology of R. J. Rushdoony

Among the many ministers who read Faith and Freedom was a young Presbyterian pastor living in Santa Cruz, California, named R. J. Rushdoony. Rushdoony was attracted to Faith and Freedom‘s consistent warnings of the dangers of a centralized governmental bureaucracy. Born in New York City in 1916 to survivors of the Armenian Genocide, Rushdoony knew the dangers of centralized power all too well. Just a year before his birth in the States, Rushdoony’s older brother Rousas George died during the Ottoman Siege of Van, becoming one of 1.5 million Armenians eventually killed byTurkish forces.14 Rushdoony’s father Y. K. Rushdoony secured his family’s escape first to Russia and eventually to New York City.

Beyond the dangers of governmental violence, Rushdoony was also particularly attracted to Faith and Freedom‘s articles on public education.15 Like many conservative clergymen, Rushdoony saw public schools as hotbeds for collectivist indoctrination and anti-Christian pluralism. Faith and Freedom suggested that it was just to resist compulsory public education, but Rushdoony found the publication’s writers to be inadequate theologians. Therefore, during the 1950s Rushdoony set about to provide a systematic theological justification for Christians to reject public education and embrace locally organized, independent Christian schools. Deploying a unique blend of libertarianism with the most rigorous Calvinistic theology he could muster, Rushdoony delivered a series of lectures on Christian education. When Rushdoony collected the lectures into a single volume, Intellectual Schizophrenia, Edmund Optiz wrote an enthusiastic foreword and helped to secure Rushdoony’s position as a rising star in the Christian libertarian movement.

It is important to understand Rushdoony’s critique of public education, because it is a microcosm of his broader theological project. As a theologian Rushdoony saw human beings as primarily religious creatures bound to God, not as rational autonomous thinkers. While this may seem an esoteric theological point, it isn’t. All of Rushdoony’s influence on the Christian Right stems from this single, essential fact. Many critics of Christian Reconstructionism assume that Rushdoony’s unique contribution to the Christian Right was his focus on theocracy. In fact, Rushdoony’s primary innovation was his single-minded effort to popularize a pre-Enlightenment, medieval view of a God-centered world. By de-emphasizing humanity’s ability to reason independently of God, Rushdoony attacked the assumptions most of us uncritically accept.

Following the lead of the Reformed theologians Herman Dooyeweerd and Cornelius Van Til,16 Rushdoony argued that all human knowledge is invalid if it is not rooted in the Bible. In his first book, By What Standard, published in 1958, Rushdoony summarized the ideas of Van Til and Dooyeweerd. Van Til, a Reformed Presbyterian teaching at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, offered a radical critique of all human knowledge, arguing that it emerges from one’s theological presumptions (e.g. there is one God, many gods, or no god). For Christians, that means a three-in-one Christian God is the source of reliable human knowledge.

The implications of Van Til’s thought are far reaching. As Rushdoony explains, mankind’s first sin was an ethical fact with consequences for the nature of knowledge: when Eve succumbed to the Serpent’s temptation to “be as gods, knowing good from evil,” she asserted her own intellectual autonomy over that of God’s.17 Mankind’s “fall” into sin was precipitated by a desire to reason independently from God’s authority.18 Rushdoony extended Van Til’s ideas to their logical end to argue that all non-Christian knowledge is sinful, invalid nonsense. The only valid knowledge that non-Christians possess is “stolen” from “Christian-theistic” sources.19

In Rushdoony’s thought, knowledge becomes a matter of disputed sovereignty. Every thought that does not begin with God and the Bible is rebellious: “Man seeks to think creatively rather than think God’s thoughts after Him. Evil is the result of man’s rebellion against God…. Man’s fall was his attempt to become the original interpreter rather than the re-interpreter, to be the ultimate instead of the proximate source of knowledge.”20 Accordingly, humanity’s pretence to independent knowledge becomes a matter of rebellion against God’s Kingdom because “any attempt to know and control the future outside of God is to set up another god in contempt of the LORD.”21 Rushdoony made thinking an explicitly religious activity, a shift in focus with political implications: thinking becomes a matter of kingship, power, rebellion, and, in the final analysis, warfare. Either human thought recognizes God’s sovereignty, or it doesn’t. There is no middle ground, no compromise. It is a war between those who, like Rushdoony, think God’s thoughts after Him and those who do not.

If thinking and education are a matter of God’s disputed sovereignty, then Rushdoony believed that Christians who turned their children over to public schools were in open rebellion against God. In Rushdoony’s view, court orders forcing public schools to cease prayer and bible readings actually removed the only possible foundation for viable knowledge. Following such earlier Presbyterian luminaries as A.A. Hodge (1823-1886) and J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937), Rushdoony’s solution was to remove one’s children from public schools and to educate them in an explicitly Christian environment. Such an action brings both child and parent into accord with the “fundamental task of Christian education,” which, Rushdoony summarized, is to exercise dominion, “subduing the earth agriculturally, scientifically, culturally, artistically, in every way asserting the crown rights of King Jesus in every realm of life.”22

In many of the Faith and Freedom articles published during the 1940s and 1950s, Rushdoony saw a reservoir of popular discontent with compulsory public education and he hoped to develop it as an explicitly Christian resistance to the authority of centralized political structures. In this sense, Rushdoony was a shepherd in search of a flock and the libertarians looked more promising than alternatives. When Edmund Opitz helped secure Rushdoony a position with a small but influential libertarian organization known as the Volker Fund in 1962, Rushdoony moved to exert his unique brand of Calvinist-inspired libertarianism on the organization. He began writing a host of position papers that attacked public education, reinterpreted American history in starkly Christian terms (see box), and advocated for the regeneration of America along explicitly Christian lines. After some internal wrangling, the Fund fired Rushdoony in 1963, but the separation was gentle, giving Rushdoony the necessary resources to write two more books.

Rushdoony’s dismissal from the Fund reflected many of the secularizing changes in American libertarianism of that time. As libertarianism evolved into a more mainstream movement, it forced most of its religious defenders to the side. Rushdoony was but one casualty in this process. By the time he left the Fund, however, he had secured enough experience as a grant writer and public lecturer to set his own course. In 1965, he founded the Chalcedon Foundation, an educational organization that he used to popularize his call for a “Christian Reconstruction” of American society. In the process of forming Chalcedon, Rushdoony decided to mentor an ambitious college student who shared his passion for libertarian economics and Christianity. Their relationship would prove one of the most fascinating – and volatile – in the history of the Christian Right….

(This is a LONG essay! Continue reading here.)