Axe to the Root with Bojidar Marinov | Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Network

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With about 600,000 African American males between the ages of 25 and 60 in federal and state prisons, the United States is the nation with the highest percentage of its black male population enslaved, er, pardon me, imprisoned. But don’t let that sink in yet, we have much more and much worse to say about it. And what we will say today about it will go against the established “conservative” stereotypes. In fact, it will go against the established churchian and evangelical stereotypes – which means, idols – of our day. We will see where our society and our civil governments have stood in direct opposition to the Law of God; and because they have violated the Law of God, our governments have been involved in a mass scale injustice: not injustice as defined by Marxists and socialists, as in “not giving money to the poor,” but injustice as defined by the Law of God, as in “enforcing man-made laws with the purpose of oppression of one group and favoring another.” We will see that the church, led by its blind or corrupt shepherds, have remained studiously ignorant of the issue, refusing to look into it from a Biblical perspective, and therefore studiously silent, abandoning her task to speak for justice and righteousness in the name of Christ. I know I’m in trouble when speaking on this issue, because I know that most Christians have been conditioned to have certain beliefs and interpretations on it. But trouble or not, folks, there is a Biblical rule: Behind every case of injustice, there is a case of idolatry. And where there is systemic injustice in a system, this is only because there is systemic idolatry embedded in that system. And if the church is not speaking against injustice, then the church is not speaking against idolatry, and therefore the church is not preaching the Gospel.

Let me repeat this: With about 600,000 African American males between the ages of 25 and 60 in federal and state prisons, the United States is the nation with the highest percentage of its black male population enslaved. To place it in perspective, these 600,000 black males in productive age constitute about 6 to 7% of the total adult black male population in this age bracket, 25 to 60. Which means, 1 out of 14. This figure, of course, doesn’t include those that are in county jails, and it doesn’t include those on parole or already released. Statistically, one of every three black American males born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime, according to government sources.

Yes, yes, I know the conservative stereotypical explanations: it’s a culture of dependence and laziness, “where are the fathers,” etc., etc.

But I am a Christian, and I think covenantally, not in mindless stereotypes. And thinking covenantally means thinking in terms of ethical/judicial realities. And thinking in terms of ethical/judicial realities, there is absolutely no way that one out of three black men is a criminal. I am not saying that there is no crime in the black neighborhoods of America. I am not denying that most of the crime there is black-on-black crime. I am not denying that there are cultural issues with the ghetto culture, and that there is much dependence, lack of vision and lack of entrepreneurship in the inner cities. I am not denying that the breakdown of the family is at disastrous levels. I am not shifting the blame for all that is happening in the inner cities to the white suburbanites of America. But folks, this is one out of three black males is a criminal, or will be at some point of his life??? And keep in mind, this is not limited to those who live in the inner cities; this statistics includes all black males, including those living in middle-class neighborhoods, including those who are among our nation’s elite. When we take them all together as a whole, one out of three is a criminal, if we trust our justice system.

Let me share some experience. Part of my mission work was among the Gypsy minority in Bulgaria. Gypsies are the most despised minority in Europe. And for a reason: Gypsies are the longest surviving thoroughly and self-consciously pagan culture in Europe. Their level of social organization and cultural morality is at the levels of our European ancestors 2,000 years ago, when my Slavic ancestors were pillaging the eastern part of the Roman Empire, and in the western part Cicero advised his fellow Romans to not buy Celtic slaves because they were hopelessly dumb and weren’t good for any work. For all practical purposes, Gypsies are a Stone Age tribe among a Computer Age population. If the surrounding culture disappears, the Gypsies would return to a Stone Age subsistence simply because their culture lacks what it takes to maintain a complex civilization with all its production, supply, entrepreneurship, communications, etc. Their morality is at pre-Christian levels as well. This is a culture that doesn’t see a problem in crippling newborn infants with the purpose of making them beggars when they grow up, or sell their daughters to prostitute. This is a culture where theft is assumed as a normal way of making a living. Etc., etc.

It is among such people that I spent part of my ministry, and it is among them that many courageous and faithful missionaries are working in Bulgaria, and have amazing success by the grace of God.

But even before we had those successes, even with the low morality and no Christian influence among the Gypsies, the criminal rate was not that high as our justice system makes it to seem among American blacks. I have been in black neighborhoods in the US, and I have been in Gypsy neighborhoods in Bulgaria. Black neighborhoods in the US are incomparably safer. And yet, among the Gypsies I knew, when we take it to individual level in that immoral, disgusting, pagan culture, not more than 10% had committed crimes that deserve punishments as harsh as prison time. Yes, most of them did petty thievery and pickpocketing. Yes, most of them got drunk  or drugged very often. Yes, they treated their wives and children awfully. But serious violent crimes or serious thievery were only done by about 10% of their male population – and this is considered incredibly high for a separate, defined culture.

And our justice system makes it look like among the black male population – all of it, not just the poor, inner city neighborhoods – the crime rate is three times higher than that of the Gypsies! Forgive me if I – with my experience on the mission field with cultures much worse than anything America has ever seen in its recent history – remain unconvinced. I don’t have to agree with the leftists and the socialists and with their ideology to see that there is a problem with justice here. I don’t have to agree with everything the Black Lives Matter movement stands for to see that there is a problem here. I don’t have to agree with the Marxist calls for the so-called “social justice” to see that real justice is not served here, and that the data show a serious problem which can’t be simply pinned on the black community. One criminal to two non-criminals in impossible, and it cannot be accepted as indicative of one-sided problem only. No matter how much wickedness we postulate among the black male population of this country, it can’t explain the numbers. There must be wickedness on the other side of the equation as well.

In order to discern if there is wickedness on the other side of the equation, we must judge the other side – our civil government and especially our law-enforcement and justice system – by the Biblical standards. That we have failed to do as Christians for many generations now, and it is time to start, and now is the best time. (Yesterday would be even better, if we had a way to travel back in time.)

When we go to the Law of God to find out whether our justice, and law-enforcement, and prison system are really doing their job, we find something unexpected for the vast majority of Christians today: The Law of God doesn’t provide for professional law-enforcement structures, it doesn’t provide for a prison system, and it doesn’t provide for government laws and policies which control non-criminal individuals or regulate non-criminal actions. Correct, you heard it: The Law of God doesn’t allow for prisons, police, or government policies and regulations. None of it, completely. We are used to believe that our modern system of government can be found in the Bible, that it is in principle good and Biblical, except for a few bad apples who make it look bad; or for a liberal conspiracy which abuses this otherwise good and Christian system. But this picture is incorrect. Our modern system, first of all, is not the Biblical system, and very little of what our government is and does today can be found in the Bible or even justified by the Bible. And second, not only that, our current system is a radical departure from the original intent of the Founding Fathers, and from the original state of the American Republic in the first two generations after the War for Independence. The story of our departure from the original intent I will leave for another time and another podcast. Today we will stick to the Bible and its principles, and.

When I tell modern American Christians and churchmen – especially churchmen – that in the Bible and in the Law of God specifically there is no executive branch of government, there are no government policies and regulations, there is no professional police, and there are no prisons, I often get the response, “But the Bible doesn’t specifically forbid them, right?” This, of course, is a humanistic and pharisaic response, and it has nothing to do with covenantal obedience to the Word of God. What such response is saying is this: “We have our own man-made ideas of how a society should be organized and how the civil government should operate, we have our own ideas of what justice is and how it should be administered, and even though our ideas are not supported by the Biblical evidence, they are OK as long as there is no literal, direct command in the Bible against them.” But this is not how covenantal thinking operates. Covenantal thinking works ethically/judicially; it is concerned first and foremost with the Biblical concepts of righteousness and justice, and then, within that context, with the proper role and place of man’s institutions. As Christians, we can’t first make institutions, assign them roles in the society according to our autonomous ideology, and then try to adjust the practice of those institutions to isolated Biblical verses. Our practice – individual and social – must be based on a comprehensive understanding of the Biblical view of justice. It is on that concept that we built; not the other way around.

Our ideas of government today are based on the ideology of the Enlightenment, and specifically the ideology of the French lawyer Montesquieu: that such government is constituted well which separated in three branches: legislative, executive and judicial. One branch of the government makes the laws; another branch makes policies and executes them, and a third branch watches over the other two and judges them if they have violated the laws they have themselves made and vowed to enforce. So deeply ingrained in us is this concept of the Enlightenment that we as Christians have adopted it as if it’s God’s view of human government, and we have designed theologies to read in into the Bible. And when we eventually can’t read it into the Bible, we say, “Well, at the least the Bible doesn’t say anything against it.” But it does.

Biblically, there is only one function of the civil government: justice. There is no legislative function of the civil government; only God is the legislator. No one else is allowed to make laws, and no laws that are not the Law of God are acknowledged as laws in the Bible. The Bible has only two categories for law systems: the Law of God (Torah) and lawlessness (anomia, in Greek). (Read my article on this, “Torah vs. Anomia: rule of Law vs. Rule by Permit.”) There is a system of righteousness and justice in the Bible that covers – in a comprehensive and yet succinct form – all possible situations of how man treats God and how man treats other men. It is a case law; that is, it encodes ethical/judicial principles under the form of specific cases, and expects human judges to apply these ethical/judicial principles to specific cases at hand today. Nothing can be encoded as law that is not already encoded in the Bible; human governments are not allowed to declare legal something God has declared criminal (like killing an unborn baby), and human governments are not allowed to declare criminal what God has not declared criminal (like selling or using narcotics, crossing national borders without government permission, doing business without a license, etc.) When governments create such legal rules, they are not laws, they are encoded lawlessness, a violation of the Law of God, and therefore idolatry and abomination before God.

There is no executive function of the government either. The executive function of government is left to the individual and the family – because property in the Bible is entrusted to the individual and the family. The executive function of the government is by its very definition and nature a claim to ownership over resources, because any executive action requires the use of resources for certain purposes. Which means – pay attention now – that executive action by the government which involves regulating people and their behavior for certain purposes of the government is a claim to ownership over people! That’s what the prophet Samuel, in 1 Sam. 8, told the people of Israel who wanted an executive government (king over them): He will take your sons and daughters, he will take your fields, and produce, and servants, and flocks, and the end, you will become his slaves. Such ownership of individuals by the government is not allowed in the Biblical law; the government is not allowed to have an executive function, only the individuals and the families are. Owning property, managing resources, making economic decisions, this is all left to individuals and families, and even there owning slaves and making executive decisions concerning them is limited and subject to different rules than owning property.

The government we see in the Bible is only judicial: courts and judges. These courts and judges are passive, they only sit and wait for individuals to come to them for solving issues. They may sit in the city gates, they may sit in the Tabernacle (like Eli and Samuel), they may sit under a tree (like Debora), but they sit. The don’t go around to execute or enforce policies; there are no government policies to start with. They don’t go around to “protect” people or offer “security” or “safety.” Safety and security are executive functions and are therefore left to the people themselves, not to the government. The government’s role is simply justice: when one man commits a crime against another man, and his victim demands a restitution. Or when two men have a dispute over legal or economic matters. The government itself is not a side to a court trial; there is not such trial as “the state of Israel vs. someone” in the Bible. Only justice, and only between individuals or between families (or between private legal entities like companies). Our modern professional police today that goes actively around “maintaining order” and looking for trouble to fix is not Biblical; such institution is essentially pagan and anti-Christian in its very purpose and nature, even if it’s manned by the best Christian men in the country.

Also, the punishments in the Bible are all based on the principles of the Victim’s Rights and Restitution. There is not imprisonment in the Law of God, and there are no fines to the state, and there are no regulations by the state. If it’s a dispute, the court divides between the two parties. If it’s a damage, the court decrees restitution. If it’s theft, the court decrees double, 200% restitution (with the option of only 120% in case of pre-trial confession and repentance). Unlike the other nations, Israel had no prisons or dungeons; in Jeremiah 38 the city rulers had to drop Jeremiah in an empty water cistern to stop him from prophesying. Locking up people for a certain period of time as a means of punishment was a pagan, barbaric practice, and God never decreed it. Thus, our modern prison system and the laws that support it are pagan and barbaric, and there is nothing Biblical or just about them. The existence of both professional police and of prisons is a sign of institutional idolatry in America today, of institutional injustice, and therefore of institutional rebellion against the God of the Bible. No matter how many good and righteous people serve in these institutions, no matter how lofty the intentions of people in these institutions are, professional police and prisons as systems are pagan and wicked.

(As a side note, the United States at the beginning were much closer to the Biblical model. The courts were the only civil institution, with the Sheriffs being only agents of the courts. Most court cases were between individuals, and restitution was the most common resolution. The emergence of police and prisons came with the emergence of socialist/statist ideologies in the US.)

It should be clear that if an institution is by its very nature pagan and wicked, no matter how righteous and well-meaning the people in it are, it will eventually start producing injustice. Those conservatives and Christians who believe that the cases of injustice in the police and the justice system are only isolated cases, “a few bad apples,” don’t understand the nature of God’s reality. Any deviation from God’s Law will by nature produce injustice; when we set up institutions that have the monopoly of power and executive privilege that the Law of God doesn’t allow, these institutions will inevitably produce injustice. God is not mocked; once we break His Law, His judgment will start breaking our society. And systemic injustice will be one of the first signs for it.

In the name of “security” (which is not a function of the civil government according to the Bible), our legislation adds more and more actions to the list of crimes that demand imprisonment. Imprisoning more and more people is a good excuse for the government appropriating more funds by taxation. Private companies are then hired to build prisons and maintain them, at the expense of the taxpayers. Then professional police is assessed based on the number of arrests they make, or on the number of revenue-collecting tickets they write. At every level of our wicked, anti-Biblical system of justice and law-enforcement there are financial incentives – paid by the taxpayers – for the government institutions and their buddies in the private crony companies to make more laws, declare more and more acts “criminal,” and fine or imprison people for them, so that there is more and more excuse for more and more money flowing to the system. We all understand incentives when it comes to government welfare: of course, when the government hands out free money to the needy, the incentive for many people will be to stay “needy.” Do we apply the same principle to government institutions and private cronies hired by the government? If the system pays for every arrest, or ticket, or imprisoned convict, wouldn’t police, prisons, and even courts catch up with the incentives and start producing more and more arrests, tickets, and imprisoned convicts? And since there is no higher power that can judge that system – the system is its own prosecutor and judge – there are no negative sanctions for cops, prisons, and judges. That is, no expenses, and free money for injustice. What can go wrong?

The only thing that can go wrong is public opinion: if too many people are affected by the injustice of the system, there will be a mass movement against it. So the solution is in the good old principle of “divide and conquer” used by every tyrannical system in history: don’t apply injustice to the whole society but only to one group. That group needs to be large enough to provide the necessary human material, and yet not that large as to have serious influence on public policy. Ideally, the group must have some stigma attached to it, like some common perception about its cultural inferiority compared to the other groups, so that the broader society doesn’t have compassion to it and won’t be willing to associate with it. If such a group exists, it can be safely made an object of injustice without endangering the government’s approval among the broader population. Remember Niemoeller’s words:

When the Nazis came for the communists,

When they locked up the social democrats,

When they came for the trade unionists,

When they came for the Jews,

When they came for me,

And since the broader population won’t normally object when injustice is done to a small group with an attached social stigma, and since money is to be made out of that injustice, we should expect to see such injustice in our society. And what group fits the description better than inner-city black males? The group is large enough to provide the material, and yet small enough to not be politically dominant. There is a social stigma attached to it (they are all thugs, right?), and there are established stereotypical responses to their complaints. (Where are the fathers? It’s a culture of dependency and laziness. What about black-on-black crime? Etc., etc.) A group that is an easy target, and lucrative target as well, for it provides the justification for more money taken from taxpayers and funneled to a corrupt law-enforcement and justice system and their cronies. And when some black men respond with violence in desperation again it, this is taken as an additional “proof” that, “see? It must be their fault.”

Do we see any real signs for such injustice? Sure enough. Multiple sources from within the police departments across this country have testified that planting drugs on black “suspects” is a regular practice. There are also multiple testimonies that police are specifically trained and encouraged to escalate innocent encounters to fabricate reasons for arrests – they even have the ludicrous accusation of “resisting arrest” when that arrest itself has no reason for it at all. Police laboratories have been caught multiple times fabricating evidence against suspects with the purpose of conviction. Prosecutors have ignored and even hidden evidence; and have manipulated juries and grand juries. And judges have been investigated – and some even convicted – of selling convicts to the prison system. We may prefer to close our eyes to these examples of injustice and corruption (until we become victims of them) but they are there, and they clearly show that a system established contrary to God’s Law produces nothing else but injustice.

Yes, most Americans today are personally and individually not racist, nor know anyone who is personally and individually racist. But the system can still be racist – not because of some inherent ideology but because of its inherent corruption and rebellion against the Law of God. As I said earlier, every case of injustice is a case of idolatry; and every systemic injustice is systemic idolatry. And when we as Christians fail to acknowledge and stand against injustice, we are guilty of being silent in the face of idolatry. And we are not preaching the Gospel.

It’s about time for the church to arise and address this injustice and idolatry. We have lost cultural influence because of our silence. We blame the moral condition of our country on the liberals and the left, but the reality is, it is our own fault that as Christians, we have remained silent, and we have allowed our pulpits to be manned by false teachers who have remained silent in the face of idolatry and injustice. There is institutional racism in the system: driven not by ideological but by financial considerations. It robs everyone: it robs black men of their liberty, it robs everyone else of their taxes, in favor of a small group of government tyrants and their cronies. And unless we as a church stand against this idolatry, we won’t see a restoration of Christian America.

The book I recommend to you today is Gary North’s Economic Commentary on the Bible. All 31 volumes . . . nah, just kidding. The volumes relevant to our topic this week are vols. 3 and 4 of Authority and Dominion, previous title Tools of Dominion, covering the case laws of Exodus 21-40. As you read it, pay attention to two principles in the Law of God: first, restitution, and second, victim’s rights. Then compare them to our system today. And then you will know what needs to change for justice and liberty for all to triumph.

And don’t forget to go to bulgarianreformation.com and prayerfully consider supporting my work in Bulgaria. If you think there’s injustice in the US, wait till you see Eastern Europe with its history of Communism. Idolatry is still alive and well in many places, and therefore injustice is alive and well. We have work to do, and your help will be of extreme value.

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With the election campaign going full steam these days, a quote has been dug out of Hillary Clinton’s book, “It Takes a Village,” a book that was very self-consciously written to oppose the growing popularity of the homeschool movement. What most of us don’t realize is that Hillary Clinton didn’t write this book to influence conservatives or Christians; she is too smart for deluding herself in such a pathetic way. The book was designed to stop the growth of familistic individualism among the leftist voters, where many parents who grew up out of the hippie movement of the 1960s, and therefore naturally suspicious of any government, started imitating Christian homeschoolers. It was this trend that was – and still is – alarming for liberal politicians, for the children who grow up as individuals in a home will always be instinctively anti-statist and anti-establishment, no matter what their political convictions are. Hillary’s book was designed to restore the vision of a collectivist society among these leftist parents – a collectivist society based not on voluntary, independent communes but on the coercive and taxing power of the state.

The quote said this: “I believe the primary role of the state is to teach, train, and raise children. Parents have a secondary role.”

I haven’t read the book so I can’t say whether the quote is real or not. It certainly sounds like something Hillary Clinton would say or write. The love for collectivism, and the hatred for individualism and the nuclear family is a foundational tenet of the political left. After all, how do you carry out progressivist policies where the state regulates all of life if you have a society of rugged individuals who have learned from their early age to depend on themselves entirely, and never learned to adjust their brains to the collective brain of the herd? Many people know about the concentration camps of the Soviet Union; what is less known is that the same government agency – the GULag – also operated children camps, and millions of children were sent there for re-education, training, and brainwashing, to be made into brainless cogs of the government machine. And witnesses say that these camps had inmates as young as 3 or 4 years old; and capital punishment was carried out for some who were 12 years old; that was officially, and unofficially for children much younger. It’s the collective that mattered; the individual was just human material.

However, if you think that collectivism is only characteristic of the leftist side of the political spectrum, you are not paying attention. In the US, the right side, the so-called “conservatives” (whose ideology doesn’t go beyond “conserving” the liberal policies of 20 years ago) are no less collectivist in their mentality than their political buddies, the leftist “liberals.” Oh, yes, they hate the specific “leftist” types of collectivism – welfare, government education (may be; most of them love it), taxes, gun control. But their agenda is not to replace it with individualism, practical or ideological; only with another form of collectivism. The blind support for the military; or the blind support for police – especially against certain groups, because inner city black males are always guilty by default and deserve to be shot or imprisoned, no matter what, and because you always obey a cop, whatever that defunct Bill of Rights may say (but it’s OK to claim it in our favor) – the fear and hatred campaign against immigrants, all these are examples of right-wing collectivism, of deep hatred for the values of that rugged individualism which characterized the founding of the United States. These are fake conservatives, real collectivists and socialists who say that a cop can shoot a person with a gun just because the cop felt threatened. In the individualists days of America, everyone had a gun and carried it openly. When a “conservative” politician declares that if elected, he would carpet bomb whole populations, and “conservatives” applaud, we know we have collectivists. And yes, folks, those of us who have military experience, we value it very much, but keep in mind, the military doesn’t produce individualists, it’s very mindset is collectivist and socialist.

This hatred for individualism and love of collectivism is also obvious in the church. I have heard more than my share of sermons where pastors – even of “conservative,” Bible-believing churches – inveigh against individualism, and declaring it to be one of the reasons for the social and moral decline today. (As if the collectivist Soviet Union prospered, and the individualist early America declined.) Modern pulpits in many places have become soap boxes for socialism and collectivism, of either variety, leftist or rightist. And all of them not only support but also encourage and help the celebrity worship cult: a modern American collectivist religion where a person of influence becomes a moral authority above any scrutiny or criticism, and subjects to his leading other people, through different forms of manipulation.

Now, granted, there is a form of individualism that is evil and should be preached against. But that individualism is theological individualism: the belief that the demands of the Law of God, and therefore the redemption of the Gospel of Christ, apply only to individuals, but cultures, institutions, governments are free of its demands. This is the Satanic version of individualism which frees from the demands of righteousness and justice all institutions of man, shrinking the Gospel to a few propositions for personal morality. Culture, government, institutions, economy, business practices, media, science and technology, art, literature, all these areas where man is involved culturally and collectively must be left morally neutral, and not subject to the rule of the Kingdom of God. “God,” this theological individualism declares, “never called us to change the culture or bring the culture under the rule of Christ; He only commanded us to be personally and individually righteous.” What about injustice in the culture, on a government and corporate level? That we should leave alone.

Now, this theological individualism is evil and should be preached against. But that is not what the vast majority preachers and churchmen mean; and this is not what the politicians mean. What politician would want to hear, after all, that politics should be subject to the Law of God? To the contrary, this very theological individualism is the operational ideology of the modern churches and seminaries; and it is the preferred theology of both left and right: the theology that whatever faith we have, should be kept to ourselves, and the culture should be governed according to what the statist elites in Washington DC says.

The individualism the statist churchmen speak against is the individualism of self-government: the freedom of the individual to be a morally responsible agent under God, and obey or disobey human powers and institutions only based on the Law of God and not on any human considerations, agendas, or, programs – whether they are government’s or church’s. The individualism which, by making the individual free to obey God, makes him free do disobey men; and by this, makes human powers responsible and diminishes their power from magisterial – that is, ruling over men – to ministerial – that is, serving men. It is that same principle that was hinted at in the Declaration of Independence, that governments are only allowed to serve, never to dominate: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . . .”

Our modern politics today, whether church or state, is simply a modern version of the older paganism. The paganism of old, that paganism that Ancient Israel had to deal with, and the paganism the early Christianity had to deal with, was collectivist to the core. It had no respect for the individual because it had no definition for the individual, no place for the individual, no use for the individual, no purpose for the individual. The pagan worldview – and therefore its social theory as well – sees the world either as a monolithic unity where no individuality is allowed, or, if there is individuality, it is all melted into a great chain of being from the gods above to the lowest creature below. And in that chain of being, the monarch (king, pharaoh, emperor) is the mediator between gods and men; any individual who wants to reach to the gods must be emptied of his own individuality and subject to a king. Even in republics and democracies, like Greece and Rome, a man had to belong to the community if he was to be man at all. “Man is a social animal,” Aristotle said, “and he needs the society. A man who doesn’t need the society of other men is either a beast or a god.” Real humanity, therefore, is in sacrificing one’s individuality in joining and identifying with the collective in everything.

We cannot understand the history of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Rome, the Muslim Caliphate, the Aztec and the Inca Empires, the Soviet Union, unless we understand this fundamental characteristic of all paganism: it is collectivist and therefore statist to the core. It considers the individual to be nothing, and treats him like it. And if we see a reaction against the original American rugged individualism in our modern politicians and churchmen, it is because the ancient paganism has been revived, both in the political arena and in our pulpits.

Speaking of the most important and novel sociological and legal doctrine Christianity brought into the world, the Canadian historian Charles Norris Cochrane, in his book, Christianity and Classical Culture (1940), says of that great theologian of the early church, St. Augustine, that in the Trinity he discovered a fresh foundation for what we have called the values of personality. The personality, the individuality of man, of course, was not discovered with Augustine. 400 years before Augustine the New Testament clearly established the individual as an independent moral agent, one who is individually responsible to obey God, and therefore individually allowed – and even commanded – to disobey men when men’s agendas and policies disobeyed God. Even Paul, in his high authority of an apostle to the Gentiles, when he praises his readers in Corinth for their imitating him and following firmly the traditions he as an apostle had delivered to them (1 Cor. 11:2), immediately continues in the next verse, “But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, and the man is the head of the woman, and God is the head of Christ.” The highest authority in the Christian church at the time declared a simple hierarchy which subjects every man directly to Christ and to no earthly authority whatsoever! And it is not just a New Testament thing. The Law of God in the Old Testament established a society of self-government of individuals in which there was no central power and no government policies whatsoever. In fact, if anything, it was against such earthly hierarchy: in 1 Sam 8, God told Samuel, “They want a king because they don’t Me to rule over them.” And the prophetic promises of the New Testament said that “no one will have to teach his brother anymore” (Heb. 8:11) and that every man will sit under his own grapevine and his own fig tree (Micah 4:4; Zech. 3:9).

Before Augustine developed the doctrine of the Trinity to derive from it our modern individualism, his master and mentor, Ambrose, bishop of Milan, told the Roman Emperor Theodosius, “You don’t even have the right to enter a private home without permission. What makes you believe you can enter the house of God.” It was in response to a threat by the Emperor that he would personally come and seize Ambrose’s church. Such talk to an emperor was unknown in the pagan world; but a Christian bishop had to talk this way, because his faith told him he had to disobey earthly powers in order to obey God.

God doesn’t equate power with government. To the contrary, in God’s economy, the fundamental and most important level of government is self-government: the individual works to fulfill his purpose in God’s plan of dominion and redemption, under God. The greater the power, the less government God entrusts to it. The King of the Universe, Jesus Christ, came to serve, not to boss people around, and thus gave the ultimate example of godly government. Government must be self-government first and foremost; because God is glorified not in mighty empires who toss people around and send them to their death or tax them to oblivion, but in the “little people,” everyone of which work on his calling before God. Man can be part of the society but man doesn’t have to be part of it in order to be human; contrary to Aristotle, man can be alone and still remain a human – as long as he is in his place in God’s Dominion Covenant of subduing the earth to the glory of Christ. And that Dominion Covenant will be fulfilled by individual, self-governing men working under God, in covenant with one another and in mutual, voluntary submission to one another.

And this is what the anti-Christian elites of our day are afraid of. In fact, this is what the anti-Christian elites of any era have been afraid of, and have hated with all their hearts and all their minds, and all their policies and regulations and legislation. Self-government plus voluntary mutual submission – even among unbelievers – eventually works for the Kingdom of God; because there is only one God Who can directly and personally lead and guide every single individual through His Holy Spirit, without leaving His place as the King of the Universe. The political elites can’t do it; they can’t work through self-government; they have to work through destroying the individuality of men in order to be able to rule. God can rule perfectly effectively through free, independent, self-governing individuals. And the pagan elites of our day know they can’t beat that. And they are scared of it.

A restoration of our Christian culture will only start with a restoration of the concept of self-government – because it is in the created nature of man to be self-governed and subdue the earth under God. Self-government, of course, as the ethical self-discipline to obey the Law of God as individuals. But not only that. Self-government also as the moral courage to stand against the attempts of collectivists and socialists of both sides of the political spectrum, and thwart their attempts to subdue our society and us to their ungodly agendas. Self-government as the ethical wisdom when and how to disobey and oppose the powerful of the day when they disobey and oppose Christ. The Covenant of God is comprehensive, it includes every single area of life, every individual, and every institution and activity of man; but at the center of that Covenant, there is no central human institution which subjects people to its will. In the center, there are free individuals, self-governing, under Christ, each under his own grapevine and his own fig tree. Self-governing also to the point of knowing exactly when they are supposed to obey human institutions and when they are supposed to disobey them in order to obey God.

The original American rugged individualism didn’t come out of the blue. It was the product of 17 centuries of development of Christian doctrine and worldview, as well as the teachings of the Reformation and its view of the priestly status of the individual man under God. Our politicians and churchmen today hate it; they hate it because they hate the Christian doctrine and the Christian worldview that created that individualism. In order for the modern elites to thwart God’s Dominion Mandate to man, they need to replace it with the state’s power domination over man. But a self-governing man under God is not subject to power domination; and this made Christianity dangerous for the Roman Empire, and for the modern pagan tyrants as well.

And we better keep it dangerous.

The book I will recommend this week is Charles Norris Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture. Prof, Cochrane shows in great detail how the worldview of the West changed between Augustus and Augustine. He goes into great detail about philosophy and culture, at times it looks like he has taken too many rabbit trails, until the reader realizes that what is revealed to his eyes is a comprehensive picture of the mind of the ancient Roman, and how it was changed into the mind of an early Christian. It’s worth your time.

And don’t forget to consider donating to BulgarianReformation.com. There is a mission field out there that still doesn’t have all the books we all have available in English. A mission field that has proven abundantly fertile even with the small quantity of seeds we have been able to plant in the last 20 years. Please help us continue to sow and harvest on the mission field of Bulgaria. BulgarianReformation.com.

The post Axe to the Root: The Modern War on Self-Government appeared first on Reconstructionist Radio.

20 years ago I was at a lecture organized by an American Reformed missionary in Eastern Europe where he talked about “being a spiritual man.” The lecture was the typical “pious gush” of which R.J. Rushdoony speaks in his description of modern ChurchSpeak: the missionary boiled spirituality down to feelings and simple moralisms. Some of his points, I remember, were outright bizarre, and he made spirituality look like some sort of modern asceticism – he even had some ideas that bordered occultism. I had a feeling his listeners didn’t buy into it; after all, they were all Protestant believers in a traditionally Eastern Orthodox country, and they had seen all those ideas at work in Eastern Orthodox monasticism.

At the end, one of the listeners asked that Reformed missionary if he could point to Bible verses that speak of true spirituality. The missionary gave some verses, but when I checked those verses later, none of them actually gave a description of a spiritual man or spirituality. His interpretation of them, I must say regretfully, was rather divorced from the specific meaning of the text.

Just on the side, over the years, I have learned to distrust Reformed missionaries who came out of American Reformed seminaries. Most of them have the same pietistic and moralistic approach to many issues. A Bulgarian Pentecostal pastor went once, following my recommendation, to a conference organized by a Presbyterian missionary. His reaction after the conference was, “Presbyterians are just like Pentecostals, they just don’t speak in tongues.” Anyway, this is another problem, for another time.

The truth is, there is a Biblical passage that describes true spirituality and a true spiritual man. The problem with that passage is that it doesn’t fit the pietistic, moralistic, sensationalist, occult narrative of the modern seminaries.

That Biblical passage is 1 Cor. 2:14-15: “But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually judged. But he who is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is judged by no one. For WHO HAS KNOWN THE MIND OF THE LORD, THAT HE WILL INSTRUCT HIM? But we have the mind of Christ.”

So here we see an amazing statement, largely ignored by our modern teachers and preachers who pretend to be teaching us “true spirituality.” The spiritual man judges all things, and he himself is not judged by anyone. And this is the only verse in the Bible that has a description of what a true spiritual man is. He judges! He has the mind of Christ, and therefore he judges, because . . . Christ judges. Spirituality, then, is related to judgment, to discerning between good and evil in . . . all things!

But it doesn’t stop there. At the beginning of the next chapter, 1 Cor. 3:1, Paul tells the Corinthians, “And I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual men, but as to men of flesh, as to infants in Christ.” You are still infants, says Paul, still immature. The meaning is, a spiritual man is a mature, grown-up man. What is it to be a grown-up man? What is it to attain that maturity of the faith?

The author of Hebrews tells us in chapter 5:11-14: “Concerning him we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God, and you have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness, for he is an infant. But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to judge both good and evil.”

Here is this word “judge” again. The spiritual man is one who judges all things. Being spiritual is the opposite to being immature and childish; and being mature – as is to be expected – is to judge both good and evil. In all things. Thus, “spiritual man,” “mature man,” both describe a man who can judge both good and evil, in all things. It is righteous judgment that defines a spiritual, mature man. He is a man who knows the difference between good and evil, and has trained his senses to discern good vs. evil in everything that comes his way.

But a spiritual man is a man under God’s Covenant. No one can have the Holy Spirit unless he is a member of God’s Covenant, because it was Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross of the New Covenant that secured the Holy Spirit for us. And even before that, man has always been a covenantal being, and spiritual men in the Old Testament era were men of God’s Covenant. A couple of years ago I wrote a few articles for a symposium on the nature of the Millennium where I pointed out that from his very creation, man is a covenantal being. He was created through a covenant, in a covenant, under a covenant, and was conditioned by a covenant. One of the participants in the discussion, a pastor and professor, objected that since the word “covenant” didn’t appear in the first 7 or 8 chapters of the Bible, therefore there was no covenant in the creation. I had to show him that he was wrong. For the Bible clearly speaks of the Creation as a covenant: Jeremiah 33:20, 25 says, “This is what the LORD says: ‘If I have not made my covenant with day and night and established the laws of heaven and earth,. . . .” Hosea 6:7 speaks of Judah and Ephraim, “Like Adam, they have transgressed my covenant.”

Man is inescapably covenantal, therefore, it is in his very nature. And the spiritual man is a man of God’s Covenant of Dominion and Covenant of Grace and Redemption. And the spiritual man judges all things based on the standards of that Covenant. Covenantal thinking, therefore, is ethical/judicial thinking.

It is thinking entirely concerned with issues of good vs. evil, justice vs. injustice, obedience to God vs. rebellion against God, worship of God vs. worship of idols. The covenantal man judges all things based on sovereign ethical standards for good and evil. All other considerations – beauty, pragmatism, expediency, human legislation, loyalty to the group or to the collective, heritage, historical habits and inertia – are secondary to the covenantal man. All these – beauty, pragmatism, expediency, etc. – may be important in particular situations only as auxiliary to the main issue, good vs. evil. And in other situations we may need to reject falling for beauty, pragmatism, expediency, human legislation, loyalty to the group or to the collective, heritage, etc., because the ethical/judicial principles of the Covenant of God, the issues of good and evil, demand it. Satan, as we all know, can appear as an angel of light (2 Cor. 11:14), and Isaiah in 53:2 describes Jesus as having “no beauty that we should desire.”

Covenant thinking, therefore, being ethical/judicial, leaves aside all these other considerations, or always subjects them and scrutinizes them – as well as everything else – with the following questions:

First, what god does this serve? Does it serve God as God, or does it serve man and his man-made gods? Does this policy or scientific theory or business practice etc. follow from a worldview based on the Biblical narrative of a Sovereign God Creator or from a worldview based on a belief in autonomous man, or autonomous nature, or dualistic reality manipulated by a multitude of spiritual beings, or an impersonal monistic universe?

Second, what view of man is there behind it? Is it man as a creature, under God and His Covenant, as God’s steward over God’s Creation? Is it his institutions limited within their lawful spheres by the boundaries of the Law of God? Is man and his institutions both mindful of their limitations, and of the man’s fallen condition, and therefore striving to comply with the demands of Chirst’s redemptive work? Or is it man as a prideful, autonomous being, with his institutions claiming divine status and tyrannical power over men?

Third, what ethical standards are involved? Is it the law of God, which is the character of God, applied to every area of life and action? Or is it man’s laws, a mockery of God’s Law, man’s autonomous attempt to define good and evil apart from God?

Fourth, who get’s rewarded and who gets punished? What ethical actions are allowed to prosper and grow, and what are discouraged and stopped?

And fifth, what do we expect God to do in history? Who does the future belong to, in history? Does it belong to the covenant-breakers, or does it belong to the people of God, as 1 Cor. 3:21-22 says, all belongs to you, the world, the present, the future?

These are the questions the spiritual man, the mature person, the covenant thinker asks. And, conversely, idols are the things and spirits and ideologies which work to sway our minds away from these ethical/judicial questions. To make us obsessed with questions that have nothing to do with good and evil, righteousness vs. wickedness, justice vs. injustice. Things and spirits that try to boil the world down to questions of beauty and harmony, for example – whether it is Hollywood or liturgical trappings in the church. Or to issues of pragmatism and expedience: our politics today is full of those. Or to issues of human legislation and formalism. (Ever heard someone justify the murder of innocent people by the cops because there was some procedural legal formal reason for the cop to shoot at an innocent unarmed harmless person? The cop felt insecure, etc.?) Or to issues of loyalty to a group or collective: whether an economic group (Marxism), or a genetic group (racism), or a cultural group (us Americans against them everyone else). Or to issues of sensationalist occult expectations (like the chip of the number of the Beast). Etc., etc., etc. Every thing, every spirit, every ideology that tries to lead your thinking away from the clear ethical/judicial issues of the Bible: worship of God, God’s institutional order, God’s ethical rules, God’s covenantal sanctions, and the victory of the Gospel in history, is an idol which a spiritual, mature, covenantal man must reject and rebuke.

It is on this ground we must view everything: theologies, books, world events, policies, scientific and technological developments, court rulings, economic and business endeavors. To think covenantally in everything we do, not as idolaters; laying a covenantal, ethical/judicial foundation for our life, and all aspects of our lives. And with God’s grace, we will do it.

The book I will recommend to you to read this week is Herbert Schlossberg’s Idols for Destruction. An amazing book which, if you pastor hasn’t read it, you better force him to do it. If he refuses, find another pastor. The book will give you a very detailed breakdown of all these idols in our society today which lead us away from a covenantal culture and a covenantal service to God. Reading it, you may be surprised how close some of them are still to your heart.

And help me deal with them in Eastern Europe. Visit bulgarianreformation.com and donate to my efforts to build the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Bulgaria.