NEOPURITAN

And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man. “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image. And you, be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it.” Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “Behold, I establish my covenant with you and your offspring after you.

GENESIS 9:5-9

Do we catch those operative words that carry over the dominion mandate from the original creation to the other side of the flood? This mandate is to be carried out by man; for God; with you and your offspring after you. The Bible is clear, whether we cover our ears or not.

So I am not going to spend any of our time here justifying the Christian’s involvement in the public square as I have already done so in the third talk of our City of God series entitled “Sojourners of the City.” I will assume up front the biblical truth that God made the city and the state to speak about Himself and therefore He made the citizen and statesman as the ethical actors on that very public stage for the same reason. Consequently there just is a God-glorifying state such that we presume to rob Him of his glory in that sphere to the degree that we opt out. What we will do is to unpack the doctrine in four parts.

• THE DESIGN OF THE CITY-STATE
• THE DISTORTION OF THE CITY-STATE
• GOVERNMENT AND LAW
• GOVERNMENT AND POWER

The Big Idea is that the city is the concentrated collective expression of the image of God; and the state is the collective expression of the physical defense of the image of God.

Ultimate worldview assumptions demand very specific, consequent ethical commitments. Because of what God made a man to be, there is a collective response to evil that is right and another that is wrong. The Christian starting point issues forth into a man with a sword rightly dividing between good and evil, just as he does with the word and just as the Word does when He returns to set up the only truly just state. We are not the Word. But a copy is still a copy, or else it is a lie. By contrast, the Buddha is, more often than not, seated with his eyes closed; and, as Chesterton said, that is appropriate, because there is nothing worth seeing down here. But then to see no evil is to stop none, and this is precisely what Eastern man has been able to do with mass violence—nothing.

I. THE DESIGN OF THE CITY-STATE

A) The Origins of the City and the State

Right from the start of the Bible, the call to dominion was a call from the social wild to the social order. The city is never viewed as evil in itself. To the contrary, the social order of God to be replicated on earth is called The City of God [cf. Ps. 46:4], and his temple was intended to reside in his city, Jerusalem. The final eternal state will center on God’s presence in the city of New Jerusalem. The Greek word for city (polis) is where we derive the word “politics.” To speak of a city-state is what the modern world means by a nation-state. The English word “city” just comes from the Latin version of the same (civitas), from which we also derive the words “civics,” “civil,” “civility,” “civilization,” and so forth. Hence what we call politics or civics was first and foremost meant to be a science before it is an art; and to be a good citizen is to make a good study of this political entity that God designed.

Within this city-state resides the densest concentration of the divine image. And therefore life was to be defended because it was the image itself; liberty was to be defended because it was the life of worship always commanded into idolatry by other masters; property was to be defended because it was the product of man, and either spoke of God accurately or inaccurately. In other words, wherever idols command the soul away from God, it comes in the form of the will or its produce being used for idolatry. One cannot worship God in purity unless not only his life in general—life is not a generality but a real thing in each specific case—but his invisible life (liberty) and visible life (property) were compromised at the directives of other masters.

The most concise statement of the elements of just civil power, outside of Scripture, may be found in a little book by the French statesman Frederic Bastiat called The Law (1850). Of life, liberty and property he says,

—this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place. What, then, is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense…If every person has the right to defend—even by force—his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right—its reason for existing, its lawfulness—is based on individual right.[1]

So when we move from Genesis 1 to 9 and see the creational covenant maintained. We then see God reconstitute the purpose of humanity in one special people called Israel. Leaving aside the debate between hard Theonomists and the rest of us, let us at least agree that the law of God is a reflection of his character and that therefore the civil law given to Israel is no exception. Consequently, even if we argue that the theocratic law given to the nation is dissolved with their ancient exile (or that it is fulfilled in Christ’s work), it would still be the case that the spirit of the law is the perfect reflection of who God is in the civil sphere. We will be revisiting three facets of the law throughout: 1) natural rights, 2) governmental form, and 3) the accumulation of power. At first we should take notice that Israel’s government went from the exegesis of the priests—fulfilled by the judges prior to the era of the kings—to the monarchy. In Deuteronomy 17 we see the application of law divided into “right” and “assault” (v. 8), covering the realm of the divine image and its defense.

This reminds us that civil law is concerned, materially, with rights and their defense. But we also see that the basic function of the priest-judge was as an exegete of the law; so that, even though finite sinners would always preside in the office, the officer was under the same law, not the officer the originator of the law. All that changes with the demand for a monarch in 1 Samuel 8; though God anticipates this and guides the people through even their national sin way back in Deuteronomy 17:14-20. In the biblical worldview, the state as an institution and the law as its information originate in God’s expression to man—his image—so that the civil sphere is a function of the divinely revealed covenant.

Now, the secular thinker has to rest all of its ideas of social justice on the notion the social contract. This was a very popular idea within Enlightenment philosophy. The most famous examples can be found in Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), Locke’s Two Treatises on Government (1689) and Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762). For Hobbes, the power of the state is a necessary evil which is preferable to the state of war which inevitably arises from the self-interest of each individual and group. Man is bad in the state of nature, but a strong central state, rooted in the monarchy, is a sufficient ordering principle. For Locke, the social contract comes closest to the Christian view. The natural rights inherent to the law are the reason for the government’s existence. “State of nature, for Locke, meant the state in which God creates man and in which man still consists. The notion did not depend on some deliberate, pre-civilized progression. Rather,

That is a state of perfect freedom of acting and disposing of their own possessions and persons as they think fit within the bounds of the law of nature. People in this state do not have to ask permission to act or depend on the will of others to arrange matters on their behalf. The natural state is also one of equality in which all power and jurisdiction is reciprocal and no one has more than another…They have no relationship of subordination or subjection unless God (the lord and master of them all) had clearly set one person above another and conferred on him an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.[2]

For Rousseau, man is born free and equal. What enslaves him and creates inequality are the rise of competition inherent to civilization and the growth of reason. Why then the state if the problem is irreversible? It is that the collective expression of the people can force people to be free. Legitimate power resides only in the people and a just law is one in which the people are present to ratify. In the French Revolution we see the shift come full circle from the law as the objective reference point to the people.

B)  The Assumption of Sin and Priority of Law

The biblical doctrine of sin informs our doctrine of the state. How so? Well, if the design encompasses the distortion—as God designed man’s life in the fall to speak about Him as well—then it follows that this dominion will be designed to prevent the distortion, to resist it: “the law is not laid down for the just, but for the unjust” [1 Tim. 1:9]. Dominion is over the earth, to subdue its corruption. Thus the illegitimate use of force requires a legitimate use of force in response. But legitimate force is not simply a preventative measure but an expression of justice.

For the founder of the Utilitarian philosophy, Jeremy Bentham, all punishment is evil because of its effects on the spectrum of pleasure and pain. On the other hand it seems to be a necessary evil.  The traditional Western answer to this question was simply that justice demands it—i.e. retribution—whereas the Utilitarian needs a motive that is aimed toward the positive increase of society’s happiness. Therefore there are two utilitarian justifications for punishment: the first is deterrence from future crime and the second is the rehabilitation of the criminal.

C)  The Decree and Design of the Sword

The definitive New Testament passage on the state is Romans 13:1-7. We live in a time and place of church history where the extreme Pietism is eclipsing the extreme of Triumphalism and in so doing exegeting texts like Romans 13:1-7 with a heavy Pietistic leaning. Consequently we tend to see the decree language of Paul’s teaching and tend to ignore the design language. Both are taught. God decrees the man in the office and God designs the office that the man holds. The decree teaches us to bear up in humiliation, as unto the Lord, to accurately speak of Christ’s humiliation under Caesar and his Roman cross—and so we obey the man—the designs teaches us that a state is to punish injustice, not create justice, and that when the lustful sword of the criminal or the mob rises up that God has given a just sword to the state to prevent the lust for power—and so we disobey the mob and its illegitimate sword in order to uphold the legitimate sword of the state. Understanding both of these dimensions of the text is crucial to applying the doctrine of just powers our specific contexts.

And that is another often overlooked truth: different Christians live under different forms of government and must therefore apply the universal truth diversely. Similar to the translation of the slave-master relations to employee-employer relations, if we do not live under a monarchy, do we really believe that Paul’s teaching doesn’t apply to us! We are called to submit to the governing officials given the form of the constitution (written or unwritten) of the particular political entity.

II. THE DISTORTION OF THE CITY-STATE

A) The Totalizing Tendency of the State

We also see a profound analysis of the disintegration of the state in Scripture. From Cain’s flight further east we see the building of cities for the purpose of hiding from God and perpetuating corrupt human power. We see the Tower of Babel utilized to consolidate all of the spheres of society under one head. But the definitive passage can be found in 1 Samuel 8 where the people of Israel changed forms of government. Here three things of the distortion are evident. The first is that the object of revelation shifts, the second is that, therefore, the form of government is not theologically neutral, and the third is what the centralization of power in a sinful man will cause as a result. Samuel is told by God, “Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them” (v. 8). Both of the first two elements are perceived in this verse. In moving from the rule of law (corresponding to the exegesis of the office-holder) to the rule of man, the voice of the people takes precedence over the voice of God. And that further implies that man is ethically sovereign and not God. True, a finite-sinner will hold the office in either case; but the center of civil truth shifts from the objective word of God to the subjective will of the majority. As to the third element, there are the unintended consequences of this shift of which Samuel warns them [vv. 11-18]. This is not the prediction of the exclusive sins of one particular tyrant named Saul. This is the natural way of the kings, of the rule of man. Thus we have a comprehensive biblical warning against the shift from the rule of law to the rule of man in governmental form, and the description of the unintended consequences of that concentration of power which ensues from the initial shift. This is a doctrine of Scripture.

B)  The Deifying Tendency of the Statesman

Certainly Cain, Lamech, Nimrod, Pharaoh and Saul exemplified this tendency. Yet it is Nebuchadnezzar who seems to most explicitly state this attitude. Of his rule he boasts, “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty?” [Dan. 4:30] Therefore God removed the secular kingdom from him. Thus were Nero, Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin all raised up and torn down by the sovereign ruler of history. One part of general revelation that we might tend to miss is what the old thinkers called the jus gentium, the laws of nations. In the Christian tradition these are a legitimate field of study as a guide in this restricted manner: to learn from the mistakes of those who have aimed the nearest to, or fell the farthest from, the eternal pattern.

The civil sphere which restricts freedom commands obedience. You cannot have one without the other. Thus the “enslaver” [1 Tim. 1:10] is included in the New Testament lists of grievous sins; and for this reason Paul says “if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity” [1 Cor. 7:21]. It was with this vision of the soul in relation to God that Paul appeals to the slave owner Philemon to “receive (Onesimus) back forever, no longer as a slave” [Phm. 15-16] on the ground that, before God, they were equals. To choose against liberty, where it can be maintained, is a choice against obedience to God.

C)  From Athens to Rome to London to Independence Hall

Russell Kirk, in his book The Roots of American Order (1974), traces those elements that resembled the eternal order of justice in the centers of power that comprised Western history. The center of world power has passed in concert with the movement of what Kirk called the “moral imagination” of each civilization. As a people group ascended to the objectivity of the rule of law, that people group solidified the legitimate powers of their polis and their political integration stepped into the void of the existing power’s increasing political disintegration, marked by a subjective turn from the law (nomos) to the people (demos).

It is interesting that in the vision of the king which Daniel interpreted, four world orders are passed through, each composed of material which corresponds to their form of government. The Asiatic Empires—the Babylonian and the Medo-Persian—are solid, gold and silver, but suffocating of human freedom and dignity; the conquests of Alexander would expand the Greek, which is the third of bronze, to a grander scale than the city-states would have in their Golden Age; then the iron represents the Roman Empire which was the strongest in terms of military prowess and scope. Finally its boundaries would divide into what would become the modern West, composed of more easily breakable clay. If we study out the political forms of these world powers, we will see clearly that there is a spectrum of what Schaeffer once called ‘form and freedom,’ such that, as form is maximized, power is retained but freedom is annihilated; as form is minimized, freedom is trumpeted, but order does not last. What began to develop in the Western political tradition is a classical liberal theory, rarely lived up to, where liberty consistent with law, or freedom consistent with form, became the ideal. This notion of self-government, rooted in objective law, reached its peak expression (as a notion) in seventeenth and eighteenth century British though, informed by Puritanism as it was. And yet the English people were more informed by an Anglicanism where the church and its truth rested upon the dictates of the crown, so it could never really take in the old world. New England was to be the shining city on the hill where the Puritan vision of Christian thought and action would have a blank slate to work upon.

III. GOVERNMENT AND LAW

A) The Forms of Government

Anarchy is the state of social disorder in lieu of the order of the state. The word ‘anarchy’ is derived from the Greek anarchia which means lack of a leader, descending in turn from the roots for “without” (an) and “first thing” (arche). There are basically four ways to constitute the civil government: monarchy, oligarchy, democracy and republic. Any other supposed forms are really a species or modification of one of these forms.

Monarchy is the rule of one, from the Greek for “one” (mono) and “first thing” (arche). No mere mortal has the capacity to rule those around him by the sheer force of his own will, as by some hypnosis or charm or threat, but is always a titular head at the behest of a small number of powerful groups, wielding the forces of expertise, money and priest-craft. Consequently no pure monarchy has really ever existed.

Oligarchy is the rule of a few, from the Greek for “few” or “small number” (oligoi) and “first thing” (arche). Since there is really no such thing as a monarchy except in name, the rule of the elite few has been the universal norm of history.

Democracy is the rule of the people, from the Greek for “people” (demos) and “rule” (kratein). The vast majority of the philosophers and theologians of Western Civilization have vehemently opposed democracy. The basic reason has always been that one cannot place “the people” as the ultimate reference point of law without assuming the same ultimate reference point of truth. By reducing truth and morality to democratic origins, nothing of humanity is safe from the dictates of this majority; nor is there any corrective, above the majority, unless democracy is modified or abandoned altogether.

Because the nature of democracy is to tend toward the annihilation of the law inherent to the people, it has in fact done so in history without exception, as James Madison observed in Federalist, No. 10 (1787):

Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.

Consequently democracy is nothing but a stage and step back to oligarchy. It is therefore the promised form of the tyrant, in which goods are offered from the public trough in the willing exchange of the rights of true law.

Republic is not the rule of man at all, but the rule of law. It comes from the Latin for “public” (publica) and “thing” (res). In other words, a republic is “the public thing,” or “the objective thing.” When it is objection that men rule no matter what the form, so that the form is irrelevant, we need to look deeper into the nature of law as to its objectivity. A republic is not a panacea; rather a republic is the only form that shouts to its members that you have not been given a panacea, but a trust.

As Milton Friedman said, “The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority.”[3] The point is that this collective force defeats the point of collective right and it is not the sort of thing you can have buyer’s remorse about. If you lose freedom it is not the same thing as purchasing a defective product. The man behind the counter this time has tazers and tanks behind him.

B)  The Forms of Law

First and foremost, there is the divine law (nomon theou). We have already established that all that God desires and does and decrees is inherently righteous. Now God made the earthly sphere of dominion to give honor to, to speak accurately of, his heavenly dominion. Those who hate the essence of the state hate the one true God; those who hate the corruption of the state ought to hate, in the corruption, that which lies about God.

How the design is discerned in the Word and in the world comes together to what we mean by the next form of law. As a species of general revelation, there is natural law, which, contrary to the building myth, does not mean “autonomous” or “secular” verdicts. It simply means the legal truth as reflected in the nature of the states that are, and, more importantly, in our reasoning about this sphere. If our right reasoning, in general, is a part of natural theology, then our reasoning about the civil sphere is what we mean by natural law. Notice at that point that any argument against the objectivity of natural law will be made by reasoning about is object—the civil sphere and our reasoning about it—and thus is self-contradictory. The doctrine of natural law, that it is objective, is logically irrefutable.

Within civil law we may distinguish between common and statutory law.  This difference is reflected in the constitution of England as opposed to the new Constitution of the United States as those two nations became separate entities.

So there is this order—the divine law is manifest in the natural law, as well as the Mosaic law to Israel (following from the breakdown of general and special revelation), which second genus of law then issues forth into civil law—from the divine to the natural to the civil. It follows that a civil law is just to the degree that it conforms to the divine law, which conformity is discerned through the lens of natural law, inside of which, is the finer lens of the moral law revealed in Scripture.

C)  The American Experiment in Constitutional Federalism

1. The basic concerns of the Founding Fathers revolved around the competing claims of law and liberty, power and its abuse. They knew that the form and freedom of the just state were set against each other to the degree that sin reigned and ignorance did its bidding. The people (demos) and the law (nomos) were magnetically repulsive in their relationship short of a republic upheld by a moral and educated population. The doctrine of ‘checks and balances’ is not simply a historical reaction, but a theological reaction to the reality of sin in the public official. Since it is precisely persons who are corrupted by sin, the concentration of power is barred from persons, as one sector of the state checks, or balances out, the accumulation of power in another. So the American system is balanced on two levels: three branches within each level—and two houses (bicameral) within the legislative branch—and a decentralized system where legitimacy flows from the locales and counties to the state to the national government.

The American Revolution was biblically justified because the British state, at least in its motion toward the Colonies, had dissolved the bonds of the covenant. The law which stood over both the crown and its subjects had been disobeyed by the state officials; and thus the lower magistrate in the colonies upheld the law and the lawbreakers were prosecuted via military campaign. The tyranny of unlawful governments may be opposed by competing magistrates whose office is also lawful. This may be done by one sovereign power protecting its borders from the unlawful force of another sovereign power, or, it may be done by a lower magistrate or officer fulfilling those duties that are within his lawful jurisdiction.

2. In our day, it is still the highest source of federal law that, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people” [Amendment 9] and “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people” [Amendment 10]. Consequently, the governments of the states may lawfully resist, even by armed force, the unlawful force brought against their jurisdiction. It is illegal for the central government to be doing anything that the people have not expressly delegated to them from that higher form of government—in the federal system—called “the states.” What is unique about our system of government is simply that the “lower” magistrates—the constituents of the federal system—are actually “higher” magistrates in terms of authority. Again, this is not “theoretical,” it is the law. The states are responsible to bring the lawbreakers to justice, by peaceable, judicial means if at all possible, until a full state of war ensues.

Where the mediating magistrates act as cowards, or ignoramuses, the populace may inform them that the powers of all such magistrates are derived by the consent of the governed. Indeed this consent is an expression of each individual’s life, liberty and property and it is this natural right, and nothing else, that has instituted each level of government as expressed in the laws themselves:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Hence the right of armed police action belongs to the people, in the formation of a state, where the former civil government has broken down. This is the fundamental reason why the American Revolution was justified under biblical principles. The citizens of the colonies did not revolt against a legitimate state, but the lower magistrates and people performed a defensive police action against a rouge state that had broken down into a state of war. Thus, in Romans 13 terminology, the crown had abdicated its sword and played the rebel, at which point the lawbreakers of London were brought to justice for their barbarous activity.

It is important to note, first, that the representatives of the American colonies sought remedies peacefully, according to English law, for over a decade of the Intolerable Acts, and second, that the British anarchists invaded a portion of the citizens from which they derived their authority. Thus the Patriots’ resistance was a defensive police action meeting all of the standards of the just use of force. Their life, liberty and property were assaulted without just cause.

IV. GOVERNMENT AND POWER

A) Three Branches as a Reflection of Christ

1. The prophet Isaiah tells us that, “The LORD is our judge; the LORD is our lawgiver; the LORD is our king; he will save us” [33:22]. The offices of Israel were triune and the government of Israel was triune. But alas, an analogy submerged in sin is in need of a fulfillment. Therefore human government is not an end in itself and the prophet finishes that this Christ will save us, not any work of human government. Yet the government not ordained to save is ordained to speak of the Savior-King, and it will speak accurately to the degree that it exemplifies this Trinitarian stamp: the executive, the legislative and the judicial, as the Father decrees, the Son is this logos and the Spirit glorifies, or interprets, the Word.

Henry de Bracton wrote De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae (On the Laws and Customs of England). Arguing from a stream of Roman canon law and English common law, he began to argue that the king ceases to be the king when he acts against the law. This he wrote during the drawing up of the Magna Charta in 1215. The document was forced onto King John by his barons. It at least guaranteed the rights of “non-serfs,” which at least placed the King under the law. A century earlier, Henry I had granted rights, restricting his own sphere of power; but the significance of the subjects demanding rights and being the agents of checking it was that if the only rights ever restricting the king came from the king, then, in principal, the rule of man still held sway.

The elements of this civil sphere, as summarized by John Calvin in the Institutes of Christian Religion (1536), “are three,”

the magistrate, who is president and guardian of the laws; the laws, according to which he governs; and the people, who are governed by the laws, and obey the magistrate.[4]

The Puritan, Samuel Rutherford, wrote Lex Rex (1644), which means “the law is king.” Of course Rutherford, being a Scottish Puritan, was not against every form of divine right! He believed that the Presbyterian form of government was so clear in Scripture that it ought to apply both to church and to state. The two are distinct, but it is still for the state, he thought, to at least promote the true religion by repressing alternative religious speech.

2. Of course we have to know that these three functions of the state are to maintain them. The legislative branch crafts the laws, the judicial branch interprets them, and the executive branch enforces them. The abiding legal philosophy that makes the judicial branch what it is has recently been called “Originalism,” though it is sometimes still called strict “Constructionism.” Truthfully there is no other philosophy of law that makes sense of having written law to begin with. The principle of “let the decision stand” (stare decisis) assumes that there is more wisdom in the people and the ages than there is in the imaginations of one or a few elites. Applied to Constitutional Law this principle assumes that those who wrote a law, particularly a law foundational to entire civil order, must be taken seriously as to their intent, not sifted according to the supposed progress of a whole society that it takes nine judges behind closed doors to tell them how much they’ve progressed!

B)  Just War as an Extension of the State Principle

What constitutes a just war? The answer is that, since a war is a prosecuting use of force turned outward to an alien illegitimate force, the very same thing that justifies the use of force within the nation-state justifies its extension to alien prosecution.

The three tradition questions that are asked are these: 1) Is the cause just in general? 2) Is it in our national interest? 3) Are we likely to win? Now questions 2 and 3 are certainly relevant to strategy at the war college. However, if the answer to the first question is ‘Yes,’ then 2 and 3 becomes ancillary details; and if the answer to the first question is ‘No,’ then 2 and 3 become polemical pretexts for an unjust war. In summary, the questions of national interest and probably victory belong to strategy and not to the first principles of just war.

Is an unmanned attack plane more immoral because it “de-personalizes” killing? This seems to be a revealing question. I don’t disagree that depersonalizing the killing of people will be the tendency of this as much as the invention of the atom bomb was. On the other hand, the two cities in Japan destroyed by the bomb represented far less lives on both sides lost than would have been lost in an invasion of the whole island. At any rate, what is revealed in this objection? The notion of the “gentlemanly war” or a “war between brothers,” which reached its peak expression in the Genevan Convention, is perhaps the most underrated hypocrisy in the long history of hypocritical notions. Feeling as though you’re playing a video game when you’re really killing people “depersonalizes” warfare, but the desire to fight wars free from mass extinction or ‘easy kills’ to recapture the “honor” of it all doesn’t? Excuse me! Are we not thinking of the words “depersonalizing war,” as if it were the same thing as putting Astroturf in at Wrigley Field?

The whole premise of a just war is that an aggressor has stepped out of the social covenants and must be stopped for the same reason that the police stop a bank robber or hostage holder. The heightened means of violence on the part of the police action is only in proportion to the means utilized by the aggressor. What is especially hypocritical of the selective pacifist here is that his outrage is directed not at the potentially evil motives for war but at the excellence with which it is executed. From a biblical perspective, if the Image of God in one’s crosshairs does not need to die, then you have no business fighting a war even with cap guns or toy swords. The moral issue is not the availability of force but the legitimacy of its use (in any amount).

C)  International Relations and Global Consolidation

On the principle held by everyone from Aristotle to Montesquieu, the government that governs least governs best. This did not simply refer to the size of the state’s bureaucratic largess, but to its per capita constituency. We know in our everyday lives that when everyone owns something, no one really owns it; and therefore no one takes the initiative or responsibility in its maintenance. As the state expands its powers and as the local becomes more remote, the ownership in the franchise is diminished and the state officials become more unaccountable. Thus there is a kind of tyranny of the critical mass.

How much more would this be the case beyond the current boundaries of nations? The fear of a one world government is not simply about conspiracy theories. It is, scientifically, a bad idea and, at the same time, an inevitable tendency of an ever shrinking and ever secularized world. It also happens to be the stated goal of Western intellectuals for over a century now.

If nothing else, the Christian should have a working understanding of where the flow of political history is going, so that we can pray for the strategy of missions that we ought to. Think of the current surge of Christian ideas in China and Africa.

D) The Strategy of Christianizing Mission in the Rising Powers

At one extreme the modern Christian mission attempted to ‘Westernize’ the mission field and at the other extreme the postmodern Christian mission is attempting to ‘relativize’ the mission field. Beyond these wrongheaded views, the biblical mission is to bring the gospel to the nations within the context of a worldview that stands over the cultural norms all nations.

The basic reason that hard Theonomy is unbiblical is that Christ the King fulfills the form of government for which Old Testament Israel’s civil law was the shadow. It is true that the monarchy in David was not God’s original design, chronologically or essentially; but we must understand that even in the original law, Moses and then the priestly class functioned as the representative of the true King, Yahweh, so that when Christ reigns over the church and the nations now, the secular monarchy of Christ is only announced by the church and not enforced by the church. This follows from our doctrine of Christ. Christology informs Theonomy at this point: not the other way around (as hard Theonomists would have it), not side-by-side (as Two Kingdom Pietists would have it). So the City of God informs the city of man in the church age, in the form of the prophetic office and not the kingly office, while the office of secular statesman remains until Christ returns. We influence/invade the secular with the sacred via information rather than force.