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

Welcome to Episode 68 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will look at a crystal clear example of covenantal approach to history. You know, that approach that looks at history not as a motley collection of purposeless, haphazard events of no origin nor direction, but as a string of God’s actions according to His plan for history, which is the progressive revelation of His Kingdom in history and on earth, manifested in the victory of the Gospel of His Son, again, in history and on earth. Is the difference important for a Christian? You bet. Our Christian faith hinges on whether we believe that history, in its every single event, is controlled by God for the purposes of His Gospel. The so often quoted verse of Gen. 15:6: ‘Abraham believed in the Lord; and He reckoned it to him as righteousness,’ repeated several times in the New Testament, was not speaking about Abraham’s faith for things present. Read the context of Gen. 15: it was faith in the future, faith about God controlling history so that Abraham’s seed eventually became the dominant factor on the planet: ‘So shall your descendants be.’ To have such faith towards the future that only can be credited for righteousness (for no other kind of faith would suffice), Abraham ad to believe that there would be no gray area in history free of God’s control. Everything, to the minutest detail, would be directly and intimately governed by God. That’s what’s called a covenantal approach to history. Such approach, then, would logically include covenantal sanctions: because of God’s Kingdom is to be manifested in history and on earth, then, at least partially and progressively, the war against the enemies of God, against covenant-breakers, will be waged in history and on earth, and there will be victories against them, which means that they will be gradually and progressively defeated in history. Until all of Christ’s enemies are made his footstool, which is the ultimate objective of the Gospel in history (1 Cor. 15:25). God will bring about Christ’s victory by defeating His enemies in history.

The historical example we will use to show this covenantal lesson is of an utmost significance for us. Why? Because, unlike other historical events of which we have spoken before, this one is unfolding right in front of our eyes today. And not only that, it is also of enormous relevance to us as American Christians; for the sins involved in this example of historical sanctions are also sins that we as American Christians commit today, en masse, as a church, following wicked leaders and politicians. And we have not repented of them, and in fact, we are still involved in those sins. So we better pay attention.

This last week, the parliament of South Africa passed, with overwhelming majority, a motion put forward by the radical leftist party Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and accepted by the ruling African National Congress. The motion provides for legal action by the South African government to start confiscating agricultural land from white farmers and give it over to the black population. The decision is of very high historical significance, because it is the only such legislative act in this century so far which prescribes punitive executive action along racial lines. Even Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, while driving the white farmers out of their farms, didn’t declare it officially to be motivated by racial differences. (The racial prejudice in Zimbabwe was in the selectivity of the executive action, not in the official legislative language.) Racial segregation and oppression, of course, was common for many countries during the 20th century, always in favor of white populations, but after the civil rights movements in the US, the decolonization of Africa and South-East Asia, and the fall of the Apartheid in South Africa, such racially motivated action and speech have been to great extent barred from official pronouncements of the world’s governments. The Parliament of South Africa brought back to life the Frankenstein of racism by government action.

As of now, there seems to be little hope of repealing the motion. The ruling African National Congress seems to understand the dangers of the motion to the country’s economic situation and international reputation; the new ANC president, Cyril Ramaphosa, delivered a rather moderate speech giving vague promises that the government will proceed ‘carefully’ and that there will be no land-grabbing. And yet, his own party needs the support of their allies, the EFF. The Democratic Alliance, a party with a long history of anti-racism and anti-Apartheid activism, is too weak politically to make any difference. The international political establishment doesn’t seem too interested in confronting South Africa about its new form of Apartheid and government racism. Even if it did confront it, little would come out of it; the white Apartheid survived for several decades in the midst of constant international condemnations and embargo. It looks like the white farmers of South Africa have little hope to keep their land. And without compensation, the prospect before their families is certainly not bright.

There could have been an easy solution to their plight. Coming not from their own government and their own society, but from other nations. Such solution has been known to Christian Europe for centuries, and it has been used extensively, especially by Protestant nations. It is called ‘open borders.’ Starting from the 8th and the 9th century, especially after the rise of the most massive and the longest-lasting grass roots movement, The Peace and Truce of God movement (we will cover it in a future episode of Axe to the Root), Christendom understood it as an imperative for both nations and for their rulers that whenever a minority came under persecution by their own rulers, it had the God-given right to cross the border into territory where its rulers had no power to persecute. The already Christianized Roman Empire allowed Goths and Franks to flee from the attacks of Attila’s Huns into its own territory. (Later these same Goths and Franks helped it defeat the Huns and protect its borders; in fact, it was the Franks who preserved the Roman civilization long after the Empire was gone.) During the middle ages, tribal groups would cross borders to flee attacks and persecution, and it was expected that local rulers would not interfere with the movements of such groups. The crusades against heretical groups like the Cathari and the Albigenses produced a mass exodus from South France, and rulers in places as far as the Balkans accepted the refugees. If Spain persecuted its Jews, France and the Netherlands would accept them. If some German princes would persecute certain groups, other German principalities would be safe for the same groups. Etc., etc., etc. Open borders have always been the hope and support for those persecuted. And they could have been the hope and support for the white farmers of South Africa . . . provided, of course, America had stood faithful to her Christian legacy and had open borders. As it is today, even Christians and conservatives in America refuse to be faithful to that legacy, and root for the utterly pagan policy, passed in the US by socialists, occultists, and other enemies of God, namely, immigration restrictions.

That’s why we, the nation who declared to the world, ‘give me you tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,’ today say no such thing. And those farmers have no place to go.

Well, of course, in the last week or so, there have been voices among conservatives and Christians in the US for Trump to allow white farmers from South Africa to immigrate. In fact, there is even a petition to that effect. I have mixed feelings about it, however. On one hand, obviously, I am absolutely for opening the borders for persecuted people from around the world to find a safe haven in America. On the other hand, however, the very concept of ‘Trump allowing people to come over’ is a deeply socialist and statist concept, and it has nothing to do with Biblical ethics, nor, for that matter, with the US Constitution. ‘Allowing’ people to come over presupposes that the civil government has the right to control the movement of non-criminal individuals. While South African farmers should be able to freely come over, this should not be a matter of government permission anymore than homeschooling or changing your job or renovating your house. All those are economic decisions, and no economic decision of a family or an individual should be the business of any government to permit or prohibit.

There is also deep hypocrisy in that conservative petition. Under the current immigration law ‘ designed and lobbied for by Ted Kennedy and other socialists, and supported by modern conservatives (who are the same socialists as Ted Kennedy, their claims to the contrary notwithstanding) ‘ South African farmers are generally not eligible for immigration. The current Immigration and Nationality Act is basically a prohibition: it prohibits anyone from immigrating, and then only extends grace to four limited groups of people. South African farmers, as a group, are not among them. The law, however, allows significant latitude to the executive to decide on specific cases; in fact, the Immigration and Nationality Act was entirely designed to place all the privilege of controlling the movements of people in the hands of the executive. (In fact, unknown to the vast majority of Americans, this executive control over the movement of people extends even over US citizens. That’s why, when you travel abroad and return back home, the border control person at the airport has the power to ask you where you have been and for what reason. As I said in my lectures on immigration several years ago, whatever you want the government to do to the stranger, it eventually ends up doing it to you.) This executive power allows the executive to decide about specific cases or specific groups. Thus, under the Immigration and Nationality Act, Trump has the power to decide in favor of a specific group abroad, or even grant amnesty to other groups already here. So he can easily remove the restrictions for South African farmers and let them immigrate to the US.

But that’s what Obama also wanted to do with another group: the refugees from the Middle East, from the countries that the US military has bombed or continued bombing, or has destabilized through its foreign policy. He also wanted to do it with the abandoned children from Honduras and El Salvador. In fact, Obama was much more careful: while the Act gave him the executive power to just make the decision, he preferred to defer it to Congress and have a legislative approval. But when he did that, oh what self-righteous indignation all conservatives and the majority of church-goers all fell in, and oh how many sanctimonious moralizing sermons we heard about Obama ‘breaking the law’ and ‘acting criminally.’ And the same conservatives and church-goers now insist that Trump does exactly the same with their own preferred group. Apparently, when Obama does it (in fact, he didn’t even attempt to use his executive power), it is ‘breaking the law,’ but now that Trump is in power, it’s not breaking of the law anymore. Is it surprising, then, that with this and many similar disgusting displays of hypocrisy, conservatism and Christianity are losing support among the young people? And then, of course, we blame the millennials, but the reality is, it is conservatives and Christians who are the reason for their own demise.

The only consistent solution is the Biblical and constitutional solution: open borders. Get the government out of the business of controlling immigration. Let non-criminal people travel and settle freely. Only control citizenship; may be even deny them citizenship forever, who cares. Citizenship is only a privilege, not a right; the freedom to move and settle and find a better life for one’s family is a God-given right. In order to help those in need, and not be hypocritical about it, open the borders.

Conservatives’s and church-goers’ hypocrisy notwithstanding, it is still true that the only righteous response to the plight of those South African farmers is opening our borders. Whether our economy needs more farmers or not is of no consequence. (Pure pragmatically, it doesn’t. Our nation produces more food than it needs, and more than we can even consume.) Whether they are culturally integrated or not is of no consequence. (In fact, they are not. Mexico is much closer culturally to the US than is South Africa, let alone rural South Africa.) Whether they are white or not is of no consequence. People should be free to seek and find and settle in the best place for their safety and productivity.

Having established the solution for the problem, however, we as Christians should resist the temptation to instinctively side with the white farmers of South Africa, and identify with their plight. Because, while the decision of the South African parliament is obviously wrong, and it will bring more suffering to South Africa. But such decision was not made in a historical vacuum; and it certainly wasn’t made in a covenantal vacuum. Yeah, we can say that the decisions was motivated by racism, but we shouldn’t stop to assuming racism was only the immediate cause for it. Because racism was present much earlier, one or two generations ago, and that racism was deeply embedded in the way white farmers were able to acquire that land in the first place. And less we forget, for two generations during the previous century, South Africa was governed by the most repulsive system of overt institutional racism, unique in the whole world in its government oppression of whole populations of people entirely on the basis of their skin color.

One of the most amazing achievements of the South African system of apartheid between 1948 and 1990 is the fact that it was capable of convincing millions of Western Christians and conservatives in general that it was a ‘capitalist’ system which fought for freedom and against socialism. Nothing could be further from the truth. The apartheid was a socialist system all the way through. It was a system of oppression of one group of people in favor of another group of people. And for most, if not all, of the history of the apartheid, it was the white farmers who profited the most from this oppression.

Of course, South Africa didn’t invent racism, nor did it invent racial segregation by legislation. The earliest racist theories in the West sprang out of the Enlightenment and its environmentalist theory of culture in the second half of the 18th century. Before that, the only consistent racist theory about the moral or biological inferiority or superiority of certain races based on skin color could be found only in the Talmud ‘ the so called ‘Curse of Ham’ myth, which was designed to justify the North African slave trade in the Caliphate, controlled at the time by Jewish merchants. European Christendom had no racial theories nor racial consciousness; the identity of Europeans was religious, as Christians vs. non-Christians, not as a genetic pool defined by skin color. The first attempts at African slave trade by the Portuguese were justified by the fact that the blacks were pagans, not by their skin color. Ethiopia, on the other hand, as a Christian country, was considered part of Christendom, and Portuguese soldiers and mercenaries fought in service of the kings of Ethiopia. Vasco da Gama’s own son, Cristóvão da Gama, died a heroic death defending the Queen Mother of Ethiopia against Muslim invaders in 1542. Black slaves brought to Portugal or Spain in the 16th and the 17th centuries were converted and freed, and became part of the society; some rose through the ranks to become prominent figures in the society. (Visit the San Marcos fortress in St. Augustine in Florida, to see evidence of black military commanders in the Spanish army.)

Racism as a theory was introduced in Europe through the Enlightenment. The French and Scottish Enlightenment philosophers rejected the concept that culture is religious and creedal in nature and started playing with ideas that culture is the product of material forces: climate, soil, physiognomy, genetics, etc. This led to the theory that certain physical features, being the product of physical factors and also physical factors in their own turn, were culturally and morally superior to other physical features. Thus, Europeans had a superior culture with superior technology and superior justice not because of the prevailing Christian faith and Biblical worldview but because somehow the physical make up of Europeans make them superior and therefore capable of creating a superior culture. Christian thinkers were quick to fall in line and adopted that same Enlightenment ideology; and the Rabbinic myth of ‘the Curse of Ham’ was put into use in the Christian churches. By the end of the 18th century, a number of racist policies were adopted by Western powers, and slavery, while originally not motivated by racism, was gradually made justified by the supposed racial inferiority of the blacks. It helps, however, to keep in mind, that that early racism was not limited to racism against blacks. Europeans also saw themselves divided by races. The English considered the Irish a ‘foreign race’; in fact, even as late as 1915, English ‘scientists’ described the Irish as an ‘African race.’ Benjamin Franklin, complained about the ‘swarthy Germans’ who had immigrated in America and declared them to be foreign to the white Anglo-Saxon race. Etc., etc.

But the real boost to racism in all its forms came from Darwin’s Origin of Species. It introduced a new element in the interpretation of cultural exchange and action: the struggle for survival. While racism came from the Enlightenment and was prevalent in the Western world by the 1850s, it still carried the older Christian missionary impetus. Cultures and civilizations were still considered mutually beneficial, even if conditioned by material factors. Both French and Scottish philosophers (the left and the right wing of the Enlightenment) looked at non-European cultures as ‘backward’ but still containing some good elements worthy of borrowing; also, they believed that, eventually, all non-European cultures will adopt the European culture. Voltaire and Rousseau could talk about the ‘noble savage’ who could teach Europeans about simple and honest life, uncorrupted by the influence of the civilization. British governors of India could envision a day when India would shake off her paganism and adopt Christianity, and join her sister Britain in being the two most exemplary Christian peoples on the earth. Western racism of before 1859 was pagan and immoral, but it was mitigated by the remnants of Christian thought in the culture.

Darwin’s book destroyed its outlook. It was racism taken to its logical conclusion. Its subtitle read, Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Darwin could have chosen another word instead of ‘races.’ He could have used ‘species’ or ‘genus’ or ‘kinds.’ He chose to use ‘races,’ a word that could easily be understood by his contemporaries ‘ and by us today ‘ to denote not just animal and plant species, but also human races, as white, black, yellow, etc. The hint was taken, and quite soon Darwinism became the leading paradigm in sociology and history before it did in biology and the other natural sciences. Cultures and races and civilizations were now understood to be in a deadly conflict with each other, and survival would be the prize for those who win. Before 1870, European colonialism was exploitative and at times cruel, but it was still relatively benign and missionary. After 1870, in most colonies, it turned into a full-scale war against the local populations. The genocide against the population of the Congo by agents of the Belgian king Leopold between 1885 and 1908; the murders of whole tribes in the American West by the US Army soldiers after 1865, the forced slavery or removal from the land of South American natives by the local governments are only the tip of the iceberg of thousands of other less known cases. In some cases, even European colonist populations were not spared; in the Boer Wars between the Dutch population of South Africa and the British Empire, the British army created the first concentration camps in history to incarcerate civilian population (women, children, and elderly); tens thousands of Boer women and children died in those camps by deliberate starvation and refusal of medical help.

It was in the context of this belief in the ‘struggle for survival of the races’ that the first apartheid legislation was created in South Africa. And the black vs. white history in South Africa is much worse than anything you could have imagined. If you thought that whites were the civilized side, and the blacks were the savages, you are severely mistaken.

During the Second Boer War (1899-1902) in South Africa, the native tribes didn’t take anyone’s side. Blacks were employed in mainly non-combatant roles by both sides, and very few blacks were assigned roles as scouts, again, by both sides. (It was admitted that black stretcher workers on the battlefield, working at times under heavy fire, saved the lives of thousands of British soldiers.) Despite that neutrality, both sides in the war, following a ‘scorched earth policy,’ destroyed black farms and villages and drove peaceful black population out of its land. The British Army, having already created concentration camps for the Boer population, created camps for the neutral black population also. As many black Africans were interned as Boers, for the only reason that their native land was in the way of the British armies. But things would soon get worse . . . for those same blacks who stayed neutral.

The surrender of the Boers and the end of the war resulted in the integration of the two Boer republics into the British Empire. The Boers were not happy about it, and a few Boer rebellions followed in the next several years, but the British government was determined to win the Boers on its side. A British imperial administration was appointed to lead and oversee the restoration of South Africa, and the integration of the Boer population into the British Empire. Much of the work of that administration was focused on the economic restoration of South Africa, built on developing industry and mining. But in order to placate the defeated Boers, it also gave the start to the first institutions of what later will become the apartheid ‘ a legislation of forceful segregation of the population of South Africa based entirely on skin color. At the time, it was known as the Colour Bar Act of 1911. It established segregation in respect to work in industrial factories and the gold and diamond mines in South Africa, clearly in favor of the white population. During the same period, a new policy of land re-distribution was introduced which designated whole regions of agricultural land to be available for purchase and ownership to whites only; only 8% of the agricultural land was set apart for the black population. While the movement of blacks was not limited at the time, all blacks residing or working in cities of predominantly Afrikaner population were required to have passports and work permits. Yes, the same blacks who not only remained neutral during the ‘white man’s war,’ and even helped equally both sides

The Colour Bar Act was challenged in 1919 by the mining companies in South Africa. The world price of gold had collapsed by about 30% during WWI (gold always gets cheaper in war time), and the mining companies were trying to compensate for the lower price by opening the job market to cheaper black workforce. The government of the Union of South Africa moved to weaken ‘ just weaken ‘ the colour bar to allow it. This lead to a wide-scale revolt known today as the Rand Rebellion of 1921. A coalition of the white labor unions, the Labor Party, the Communist Party of South Africa, and the then very young National Party organized close to 100,000 miners and industrial workers under the slogan, ‘Workers, Unite, Keep South Africa White.’ The armed rebellion that followed was so extensive and so destructive, that the government of the Union of South Africa had to bring in a regular army with field artillery, tanks, and bomber aircraft, to crush the rebellion. This reflected poorly on the political position of the government of the Union, and the next year Jan Smuts, the Prime Minister who crushed the Rand Rebellion, was voted out of office. The National Party won the elections. The Colour Bar was preserved, and was even re-inforced and expanded.

The National Party grew in influence in the next couple of decades, especially among the white farmers. When South Africa moved to independence in 1948, in the first general elections, led by the Dutch Reformed minister Daniel Francois Malan (notice, a church minister!), the National Party won the elections, mainly with the votes of the white farmers. (The election system was heavily rigged in favor of the rural Afrikaner regions.) Malan immediately moved to introduce one of the most egregious racial segregation systems the world has ever seen. Over the next 10 years, a series of laws were passed that basically established a system of internal closed borders throughout the country. A new re-distribution of land was decreed, one that still left only 8% of the land available to the black population, but even that 8% was mostly infertile, in areas with no infrastructure at all. The colour bar was not only retained, it was made even worse. Under the apartheid, the black population was now declared citizens of the ‘native lands,’ and stripped of their South African citizenship. This made it virtually impossible for a black person to get a job in the mines or in the industrial sector, unless they went through a long process of getting a work visa or permit. Even when a black person got that work visa or permit, they were specifically barred from bringing their families with them. And since the work permit was re-entry limited, that forced many blacks fathers to live away from their families for long periods of time. The minimum taxable income for a black worker was 350 rand a year, half that of a white worker. As if this was not enough, South African blacks couldn’t even emigrate; South Africa denied them passports (they were not citizens), and the rest of the world didn’t recognize their ‘native lands’ as sovereign countries. And neither did the South African government, fearing that this would legalize imports and exports, including of strategic materials and weapons. The situation of the South African blacks was hopeless: they couldn’t develop their own ‘native areas,’ they couldn’t find work, and they couldn’t emigrate. And the legislation was so evil, that even foreign nationals were denied basic rights, if they were black. Wealthy black families from South Rhodesia, which never had segregation, when traveling to South Africa by train, were forced at the border to vacate first-class cars and move to the ‘Blacks Only’ cars; or were barred from staying at hotels.

In the cities, whole populations were removed from their houses to designated areas, without compensation. Sophiatown, an affluent historic black neighborhood in Johannesburg, a cultural and economic hub for the urban black population, conveniently close to the city’s industrial areas, was forcibly vacated by the government (police with rifles and special maces known as knobkerries against unarmed population, including women and children) and residents and homeowners were moved 15 miles away from the city. The area was bulldozed, then rebuilt under a government plan, and renamed to ‘Triumph.’ In the final account, however, it was settled with mainly poor and low class Afrikaners, and soon turned into a slum ridden with crime, prostitution, and drug abuse. Ironically, the ‘white culture’ that the government planned to exhibit higher standards than the ‘coloured culture’ turned out to be much worse than it. Similar was the fate of the well known District Six in Cape Town: again, a whole area of town was confiscated by the government, forcibly vacated, bulldozed, and rebuilt under a government plan. Two thousand homeowners lost their properties and only a few of them were given any restitution, and it was much lower than the market value of their properties. District Six, however, was never rebuilt completely. Today, only 20% of it is rebuilt, with most of the land being simply fallow land or dumping ground.

And guess how the ruling National Party excused all these actions of government control, confiscation, and oppression? That the apartheid was no different than the immigration restriction laws in Western Europe and the United States! In fact, on many occasions between 1952 and 1990, South African politicians and officials were openly referring to the ‘illegal immigration problem’ in the US as the same ‘problem’ they had in South Africa. The apartheid was very deliberately and overtly a policy of closed borders. It was based ‘ just like the US immigration policy and the anti-immigration rhetoric after 1920 ‘ on evolutionary presuppositions: that immigration restrictions were needed to assure the survival of the European culture. Behind all that was the Darwinian belief that the cultures ‘ racially defined ‘ were in a global clash for scarce resources, just like the animal species in The Origin of Species. And therefore, the survival of the civilization had to be assured by government control over the movement of individuals.

Where were the white farmers during these decades of violent socialist policies of government confiscation of property, re-distribution of wealth, closed borders, and government control over the movement and actions of individuals? They were the most fervent supporters of the National Party. All these years, the voting system of South Africa was heavily rigged in favor of white rural areas; and these white rural areas voted for the National Party and its socialist policies. There was a good reason for that. By limiting the access to the land market, the government made agricultural land exquisitely cheap. About 90% of the land was open for use to 17% of the population, of which 17%, only a small portion took to farming. On the other hand, since the native population was given mostly infertile land, the ‘native areas’ depended heavily on food produced by white farmers for their survival. Given that the ‘native areas’ had no infrastructure and therefore not many job opportunities, the farmers could always draw on cheap black labor. The bureaucratic requirements for ‘work permits’ were quite heavy, and sometimes blacks had to work ‘illegally,’ which drove down the wages. For all these years, the market was always in favor of the farmers: abundant cheap resources, abundant cheap labor, and abundant dependent markets without competition. No wonder the farmers continued keeping the National Party in power.

In itself, this was bad but no worse than the practice of many socialist governments and their constituencies in other places. What made it worse, however, is that all these abominations were committed in the name of Christ. Remember, the apartheid was designed and started by a Dutch Reformed churchman as a Prime Minster. Until the very end of the apartheid, the rural white population was the most churched white population in the world; they continued attending their church services, and continued pretending that they were building a Christian culture. Just like the German Christians did their services and sang their hymns, South African Reformed Christians ‘ especially in the rural areas ‘ did their services and sang their hymns, while voting for mass government incarceration of whole populations, government robbery, redistribution of wealth, control of individuals, separation of families or banning marriages not on the basis of religion but race, etc., etc. While any sin is an abomination before God, there is a special commandment, part of the Ten Commandments, against using the name of God in vain. South Africa has been violating that commandment for decades. And among the worst culprits in this massive violation were the white farmers. For all our sympathies for them, we as Christians can’t lawfully overlook that grievous cultural and individual sin committed in the name of Christ.

Bill Evans, a wonderful friend and, as you might remember from our introductory episode to Axe to the Root, the inspiration for me to start this podcast, asked me a few days ago in relation to an article I had written many years ago: How does God’s judgment works in the modern world for the sins of a nation, or at least, of a generation of people?

The way God deals with the white farmers of South Africa gives us a good illustration of God’s covenant judgments in history. For a generation after the end of the apartheid in South Africa, there was no word of remorse or repentance from those who carried the name of Christ and pretended to worship Him in their churches Sunday morning. The opportunity was there. There was also the opportunity for the farmers’ community in South Africa to try to rectify at least some of the damage by starting some sort of programs of training the young generation of blacks to become master farmers and eventually, independent entrepreneurs. For 90 years blacks were unlawfully barred from access to fertile land, and to produce markets as producers. They had no opportunity to develop the skills needed for independent entrepreneurship in agriculture ‘ and much of that lack of opportunity was due to wicked legislation. Since white farmers were the main beneficiaries of the system of apartheid, one sign of their repentance would have been a coordinated attempt to make up for all these years and offer training and assistance and reconciliation. Nothing like this happened. Much like the Canaanites in the time of the Exodus were given one extra generation to repent or to fill the cup of their iniquity, the white farmers of South Africa were given the time to use their ‘wealth of unrighteousness’ to make friends (Luke 16:9). They didn’t make a good use of that time. God is now visiting the sins of the fathers on the children (Ex. 20:5). And He uses the Assyrians of our day ‘ the Communists ‘ to carry His judgment.

As I said in the beginning, that is not an excuse for us to not open our borders to them. Whether they are victims of human injustice or a rightful target of God’s justice, or both, should not be a factor in our own decision-making. A people in distress may or may not deserve mercy, but a people in affluence is under obligation to use its wealth according to God’s mercy; and God’s mercy requires that we spend our own money to nurse back to health even our enemies, as the parable of the Good Samaritan says.

But there is a covenantal lesson for us in all this: God doesn’t tolerate the injustice of closed borders for too long. Eventually, the people who have relied on the power of the state to protect their privileges, lose that power. And then eventually God turns their own oppression against them, and makes them feel the sting of it. A lesson Christians in America better learn, less we find ourselves in the same situation. Or, if you want some taste of reality, the rise of socialism in America in the last 20 years is only foretaste of what is coming; and it is not the fault of the left. It is our own fault, for supporting anti-Christian, socialist policies. And one of them is closed borders.

The book I will assign this week is Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane. The book is an autobiography, not a historical study. I read it many years ago, and I have only general memories of it. One thing I remember clearly: The hopelessness created among the black youth by the apartheid government by the policies of segregation is comparable to the sin of those who make those little ones stumble. The fact that God had so much patience with the injustice of the apartheid only shows His enormous long-suffering and goodness. Those who benefited from the apartheid and didn’t stand against it are without excuse.

And finally, in your prayers and giving, remember Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization devoted to building the intellectual foundation of the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe by translating and publishing Christian books dealing with the application of the Gospel to every area of life. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate.

Welcome to Episode 67 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will be building upon a topic that we started in the previous episode of Axe to the Root, the one on patents. We talked about science and technology and how different worldviews can affect government legislation on patents and protecting property rights in the area of inventions. We saw that in all non-Christian worldviews, there is no real understanding where science and technology come from – not only philosophically, but also in the psychological motive and incentives to do science. What is the reason men even bother to discover new things? No one knows. That is, no non-Christian religion or philosophy knows, people just happen, just out of the blue, to want to discover new things, and spend the time and energy to discover new things, no one knows why. The motivation is clearly there, but what causes that motivation is rather looked upon as some sort of magic or occult. We saw that this is the reason for the chaotic legislation on patents. And we also saw the Biblical interpretation of the factors behind the motivation for discovery and invention: it is the Dominion Mandate. Man is commanded to fill the earth and subdue it, that is, make it productive for an expanding mankind. Based on a Biblical view of science and technology, we don’t need any special new ethical and judicial system for protection of property rights; the Law of God and its protection of property – specific, defined, lawfully acquired or created possessions – is sufficient.

What I want to look at, this week, is the relation of technology to our stewardship of creation, and specifically, our stewardship of the environment. Specifically, pollution. Technology is all fine and dandy and we all like to have fancy gadgets to make our lives easier – cars, smart phones, computers, power tools, new building materials, LED flashlights, etc. The question is: does this technology come at a cost? Well, it comes at the cost of countless hours of research and production management, and billions of dollars invested into capital assets (which billions of dollars is nothing more than countless of hours of work and savings of millions of people). That much we know. But is there other cost as well. Like, what about the cost of the waste left over after the production of all these gadgets? What about the ore mines dug and left open after they have been exhausted? What about the emissions from all these plants in the atmosphere? What about the spilled fluids, acids and bases, that poison the soil and destroy the food production of whole regions; or poison waters used by whole populations for fishing? Shouldn’t this be a cost that we should take in account?

And, the more important question, if this is a cost that we should take in account, shouldn’t we self-consciously slow down our technological progress – and our economic growth, as well, for it depends on the productivity produced by the technological progress – in order to reduce pollution, that important cost? Shouldn’t we give up on some newer and better technologies, given that the more we develop, the more we pollute? Or, even better, shouldn’t we use the government to stop technological progress so that we control the level of pollution? I am an avid reader of science fiction, and science fiction, because of the nature of the genre, has always tried to give predictions about the future and the many possible problems and issues that may arise consecutive to the growth of mankind. And I remember how back in the 1970s and the 1980s, many science fictions writers liked to predict the 21st century being a future period in which the air in the industrialized world would be barely breathable. Some predicted that people won’t even be able to exit their homes without a gas mask (I am not kidding). Shouldn’t we, then, do something about it? Stop technological progress? Slow it down? May be slow down the growth of mankind in general, through population control or birth control?

Secular humanism, of course, gives exactly those answers: Slow down technological progress through government control and regulations. And, also, slow down population growth, through murder and extermination, if necessary. We should expect such answers given that secular humanism has no idea of what the world is, how the world operates, what man is, and what drives man in his quest for technological progress. Secular humanism has no idea of the Dominion Mandate, and since in its ideology, man’s existence just happened by chance, it can’t understand neither the technology, nor pollution and its causes, nor the true solution to the problem of pollution.

But what is the Biblical solution to the problem?

In order to understand it, we need to look at the overall direction of the Dominion Mandate in history: Man was given the Garden as his initial capital, and told to grow his capital base. That Garden was a small patch of available resources in the middle of an earth which was still bare. As large as the Garden may have been, it was not large enough nor resourceful enough for a growing population. Adam’s task under the Dominion Mandate was to export the order and productivity of the Garden to the whole world – after all, without that order and productivity, a constantly expanding mankind will end up starving, and therefore not expanding at all.

Now, visualize for a moment what it must have been in the Garden. It had all the resources Adam needed to start building a civilization, and he had all the knowledge and the brainpower to do it; and he did have enormous brain power, if he was able to name all the animals. We see that this was the very purpose of the resources in the Bible: to build a civilization out of them. We see at the beginning that there were gold and precious stones in the Garden; we don’t know in what condition, but they must have been scattered around, for the text doesn’t mention if they were build into something. At the end of the Bible, however, we see the same gold and precious stones built into a city, and used for the walls and the streets of that city. Thus, the course of history under the Dominion Mandate is clear: from scattered resources towards an ordered civilization where all these resources are built in. The precious stones and the gold are, of course, only a symbol of everything else, of all the other regular resources: be it wood and cloth made of plants or animals, or chemical elements and substances, or radioactive minerals and substances for nuclear fission or fusion fuels, or sunlight, or wind, or electronic or radio impulses, or anything else. They all need to be built into the city God is building, a civilization that will first conquer itself and its own sinful self, then will conquer the universe, and then, after having exhibited the supremacy of God’s Law and the glory of God’s salvation in history and on earth, will submit in Christ to God. In that final historical stage, mankind will be at its ultimate mastery and control of all of the resources of the universe, subduing it to the glory of God.

Before we get there, however, things need to be built. Things that will allow us to make a better and more efficient use of God’s resources. We may, from time to time, know how to unleash some resources into action, but that doesn’t mean we know how to use them productively. One modern example would be the difference between a nuclear bomb and a nuclear reactor: unleashing the power of the process of nuclear fission turned out to be relatively easy; channeling it into productive use is still not that easy, and we often suffer the consequences of it (think Chernobyl). It is in the building of these more and more facilities which make it easier and more productive to harness the power of God’s universe, where the Dominion Covenant is most visibly applied in practice.

But building these same facilities means that man needs to learn to harness energy and apply it to productive use. To pick up a precious stone from the ground in the Garden and put it in its place in the wall, man needs to do some work. Work is simply energy applied to effective use.

And the question of the use of energy is a central question to the Dominion Covenant, but also, to the issue of how our work affects the environment around us.

In order for man to be able to apply energy to productive use to do work, he needs to draw energy from the creation around him. Which means, he needs to find a part of the creation around him that is not in a perfect energy equilibrium (also known as “entropy”). There must be some depository of available energy, of electrons, atoms, molecules, fluids, or solid bodies which are found in a higher energy state, and under the right conditions will spontaneously move from one place to another, or from a higher energy state to a lower energy state, creating momentum, which momentum can then be used to move other things. That depository must not be active until man triggers it by applying the right conditions to it – otherwise, if it was active without him, it would just dissipate energy without doing any useful work. It must contain potential energy, energy which is not active until triggered to become active.

Think of a heavy cannonball placed on the top of a mountain in such a way as to be in a perfect balance. There is a lot of potential energy in that cannonball, stored in its sheer mass, but more important, stored in its position, high on the mountain. (That’s the physics formula for potential energy, mass times height times the gravitational acceleration at the surface.) As long as the cannonball is sitting there, it may have all this potential energy but it does no work. That potential energy needs to be transformed into kinetic energy, that is, an energy of motion, that is energy that can be transferred from the cannonball to other objects. Such transformation can happen cheaply and easily: just give the cannonball a little push to the side of the crest.

What we see then is the cannon ball accelerating down the hill. It starts gaining kinetic energy (that is, energy of motion), but only at the expense of losing potential energy (that is, energy of position). As it rolls down the hill, its position is lower and lower, or, we can say, it is moving from a higher energy state to a lower energy state, releasing energy in the process. The only question now is, how can we make this energy do work, instead of just getting dissipated in the environment?

What we need to do is build some devices to take some of that energy of motion and translate it into real motion. Place, for example, several water wheels on the path of the cannonball so that it fall in one after another consecutively on its way downhill. What will happen is that the velocity of the cannonball will decrease with hitting every waterwheel, which means that its kinetic energy will decrease every time. But that energy is not lost. (Well, some of it is lost to productive use, under the Second Law of Thermodynamics.) It goes for rotating the axis of the waterwheel. The waterwheel now has some kinetic energy which can be transferred to other devices. If we build the path of the cannonball with waterwheels, the potential energy of the cannonball won’t be lost, it will be translated into kinetic energy for different technological devices, and then used to productive work.

What happens at the end? The cannonball will eventually get to the foot of the mountain, on flat ground, where there is no more downward slope. It is not in its lowest energy state, where there is no more potential energy to spend. Which means, in its downward path, its potential energy was all transformed into kinetic energy to move the cannonball itself, or to move the axes of the multiple waterwheels on the way. When all this energy was spent, and the cannonball is at its lowest energy position (at the foot of the mountain) no more kinetic energy can be extracted from the cannonball. There is no way now to make the cannonball produce more energy to spend . . . except, of course, if we moved it again to the top of the mountain. But guess what: moving it back to the top will require, in the ideal case, just as much energy as it gave away on the way down. In reality, however, the ideal case doesn’t exist; under the Second Law of Thermodynamics, some of that energy was dissipated in the form of heat. So even if we decide to spend energy to move it back up, we will be in the red. It makes more sense to leave the cannonball resting at the foot of the mountain and try to find another cannonball. And in fact, that’s the essence of the work of the energy industry: to find “cannonballs” that are rested in a state of unstable balance at the top of the mountain, build them a downward path of waterwheels, and push them down the hill.

Cannonballs, of course, are not used for energy generation, but our example is a very good illustration of how energy works. All energy sources are in reality like that cannonball: stored potential energy in a state of unstable equilibrium – unstable because a small push can unleash that potential energy into kinetic energy. Think of the gasoline you put in your car. It’s just a liquid, right? A vaporous liquid, to be precise, but even as a vaporous liquid it is in an equilibrium. It doesn’t spontaneously change its composition from one state to another, and it doesn’t spontaneously release energy. But give it a little push, light a match next to it, and you will experience the power of the energy stored in it. But it’s not limited to fire or motion, the universe God created is replete with countless such storages of energy waiting to be discovered and used by man. Think of the trees in the forest and the grass in the fields; they are all a vast accumulator of the energy coming from the sun, waiting to be applied to different uses. Trees can be used for burning, of course. In fact, in its formative years, America had such thick woods that the railroads used firewood instead of coal for their engines; it was not unusual for the crews that ran the trains over the long transcontinental distances to stop at some place for several hours, cut as many trees as they could and store them as fuel. Vegetation has been an important storage of energy in another way, too: for thousands of years men used domesticated animals for transportation or work. And animals are nothing more than biological machines for transforming the chemical energy of plants into energy of motion. (Well, human bodies are also such biological machines but much less efficient than the animals.) A storage of energy are the clouds over our heads: the water falling down and running down mountains in creeks and rivers is just another version of the cannonball rolling down the hill, and mankind has used it to run waterwheels for centuries. But wait, this is not all, energy is stored in ways you may have not even imagined. It is stored in chemicals used to do certain work. Your soap and shampoo are stored chemical energy used to disintegrate grease and bacteria. Acids and bases are stored chemical energy used for the production of different substances. The individual atoms and ions of elements can be stored energy: take, for example, the two atomic ingredient of table salt, sodium and chlorine. In their pure state – metallic crystal for sodium and gas for chlorine – they are highly reactive. Sodium reacts with water so violently that when thrown in water, it explodes; chlorine has been used as a poison gas in wars because of its high reactivity. While they are not used in direct energy applications, their high energy level is used in chemical applications. Even table salt, in which they are combined and reduced to their lowest energy level, is still quite active and has the function of a catalyst for many reactions in human and animal metabolism, as well as for maintaining the balance in nerve reactions. This is still transforming energy from one form into another, even if it doesn’t look like a power plant. Some chemical elements have energy stored on a nuclear level, like uranium-235. In its natural state, uranium-235 is in an almost perfect equilibrium: it has a half-life of 704 million years! And yet, just put together a critical mass of it (a little over 50 kilograms) and add just a couple of fast neutrons, and see what happens within the next few microseconds. (One microsecond lasts for one millionth of a second.) All these are examples of a cannonball sitting on the top of the mountain, waiting to be pushed down the hill to transform its potential energy into an energy of motion, and then transfer momentum to a chain of waterwheels, which can then be used for work. And technology is simply the waterwheels used to absorb that energy and put it to work. The higher the technology, the better it will be able to capture every single unit of that energy and put it to work. Yes, you got it right; technology is not magic, it has a simple principle behind it: how do we find the metaphorical cannonballs sitting on top of mountains, how do we push them down the hill, and how do we build the best waterwheels to capture the released energy. That’s all about technology.

And guess what: the more technology develops to capture more of that momentum, the cheaper things become. Or the better quality we have for the same price. Take gasoline, for example. Its price today is the same relative to the average income as it was in 1960; but because we have better cars, the same quantity of gas can take you much farther today than it could in 1960. Or the cars: The average family car is the same price relative to income as it was in 1960; but if you compare a modern family car to a family car of 1960, our modern cars would be beyond the imagination of even the science fiction writers back in those days. And cars are only a very small pixel of the whole picture. The more developed out technology is, the better we capture the momentum, the cheaper each individual unit of captured energy becomes, and the more productive our society becomes. And look around us: the poorest among us today are richer than the kings of 500 years ago.

OK, stop here. This sounds so great, so convincing, and indeed, we see that our productivity has exceeded everything the world has known, and as a result we have conquered so many previously unimagined frontiers . . . but what about the environment? What about pollution? What about the side effects of all this technological development, namely, the destruction of our nature? In this apt illustration of the cannonball rolling down the hill, where is pollution included, and how can it be explained?

The answer should be simple: pollution is energy that our current technologies are still not capable of capturing.

Let me repeat this again: pollution is simply energy that our current technologies are still not capable of capturing.

See, by its very definition, pollution can’t come from substances or objects that are at their lowest energy status. In order for something to become a pollutant, it must have some residual stored active energy in it; things that are at their lowest energy state do not pollute. Take, for example, helium and all the other noble gases (neon, argon, krypton, xenon). Because of their nuclear structure and electron combination, their structure is the lowest energy level for all chemical elements. All these gases can absorb huge quantities of energy but they never give it back. (Helium and argon are used as so-called “shielding gases” in highly dangerous processes like tungsten welding, because of their ability to absorb energy.) And guess what: these gases never pollute. You can breathe them and they will never affect you. (Although, breathing in helium will make you voice funny.) You won’t even smell them – they have no smell. They won’t react in any possible way with anything in the nature around you, or in your body, or in your food. They produce ZERO pollution. Why? Because they are at the lowest possible energy level. They can give away no energy.

Returning to our simplistic illustration of the cannonball rolling down the hill, helium is like the cannonball at the bottom of the valley. Unless you do something to move it up the hill, it won’t move spontaneously. It can’t produce anymore kinetic energy for your waterwheels, but neither can it affect or destroy anything in its way. It’s just not moving, and it can’t move, even if you give it a push. It has become part of the environment.

Only those things pollute that still have some potential energy left in them, think of the cannonball rolling down the hill, but think of it after the last waterwheel, but before it reaches the bottom of the valley. It still has some energy in it, it is still moving, but its energy is not spent on anything productive, because there are no more waterwheels. Suppose that in this last section of its path there are houses instead of waterwheels. The cannonball still has some potential energy left, that potential energy is transformed into kinetic energy, but because there are no more waterwheels in its path, it hits the houses. The kinetic energy now serves not for creating a productive momentum but the opposite: it serves to destroy? Why? Because there are no more waterwheels. The technology was not develop to the point where the last drops of energy could be sucked out of the cannonball and put to productive use.

And that’s what pollution is: remaining drops of energy not harnessed to productive use. Since they are still active, they affect the environment. Since they are not harnessed, they affect it in ways unfavorable to man. (Remember, after the Curse, nature spontaneously opposes man and his efforts; it takes self-conscious effort by man to make nature serve man.) Pollution is not some magical power out there. It is simply unharnessed energy. It is simply what the cannonball would do while rolling down the hill, if we haven’t built enough water wheels, or if we have built them in such a lousy way that it hops out of their path and continues on a path different from we have predicted. Where there is no active energy remaining, there is no pollution. Which means, where our technology has captured all the energy available in an energy source and has put it to productive use, there is no pollution.

Now stop and think about it. This changes everything, right? It turns the current environmentalist narrative on its head. The current narrative is that pollution is just some magical entity out there which grows bigger and bigger the more we apply technology to the world around us. But when we analyze the nature of pollution and its relation to energy, we discover that pollution is always around us, ready to happen in a spontaneous way, for there are so many different energy sources – physical, chemical, nuclear – around us. What if we didn’t have any technology? Would we be free of pollution? Landslides and avalanches bury whole villages, volcanoes erupt and bring ice ages to the whole planet, hurricanes and tornadoes bring destruction to living things in their paths. Ever been to the Black Sea? You know that its water is anoxic (that is, has no oxygen dissolved in it) below 200 meters deep, and this made it possible for certain bacteria to thrive that produce hydrogen sulfide. That means, 90% of its water is replete with hydrogen sulfide, one of the most reactive, flammable, and toxic gases in nature, buried under a 200-meter-thin layer of salt water. (200 meters is only half the height of the Empire State Building.) Scientific modeling shows that if just a medium-size meteorite hits the water, it will release so much of that gas in the air that the area may easily become uninhabitable for a while. No matter where we look, there are natural sources of energy that with or without us produce pollution and can potentially kill and devastate at an enormous scale. Pollution is simply  energy in an uncaptured state, unharnessed for man’s purposes. Where there is no available energy, where all things are in their lowest energy state, there is no pollution.

I hope you already understand where this all is going. If all pollution is simply unharnessed active energy, then the only solution to pollution must be obvious: find a way to harness it. Find a way to put it to productive use. You can’t stop active energy from affecting the world around us; it will continue to pollute until the source of energy is depleted. So instead of waiting for it to be depleted on its own and do damage, work to find a way to deplete it ourselves and use it for our purposes. If there is still potential energy in that cannonball rolling down the hill, don’t try to stop it. Just build more waterwheels in its path, until it gets to the bottom of the valley. That’s the only logical answer to the problem of pollution.

Think of the most obvious example we have in front of our eyes today: internal combustion engines. 60 years ago, cars had to have large engines in order to have enough power to move. These large engines were a source of serious pollution. If back in those days we had as many cars as we have today, our levels of pollution would have been much higher. But why did those cars pollute so much? Because the technology of the times didn’t allow for capturing all of the active energy in the fuel and for transforming it into motion. The efficiency of those engines was low and therefore the spilled active energy was high. Over the years, however, advances in technology made it possible to build smaller engines who captured more of the active energy of the fuels, and thus decrease the level of pollution. The more energy our technologies were able to convert into motion, the lower the pollution. And, also – which is the main purpose of technology – the cheaper the use of fuel. By capturing more of that spilled energy, we have been able to lower the cost for using fuels, and, as a consequences of that, we have been able to reduce pollution. In short, our own drive to cheaper and more productive use of energy is what naturally led to lowering pollution. Eventually, more and more, we will be able to make engines that will convert all of the available energy in the fuels to water and carbon dioxide – and both water and carbon dioxide are the lowest energy level for carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, thus producing no pollution.

I can give another example I picked up in the course of my own professional career. The production of copper and many other non-ferrous metals (lead, nickel, tin, to mention a few) produces great quantities of sulfur dioxide as a waste product. Sulfur dioxide is a toxic gas – not as toxic as hydrogen sulfide we mentioned earlier, but toxic nevertheless. That’s because the molecule contains high levels of stored energy in the bonding between oxygen and sulfur; it’s a long story to explain why, so I won’t go into that. Sulfur dioxide has some limited use in food preservation, winemaking, and cleaning, but certainly not in the large quantities produced by the metallurgic plants.

The original solution was to oxidize sulfur dioxide to sulfur trioxide (an even more dangerous pollutant) and then dissolve it in water. The result is what we all know as “sulfuric acid”: one of the most potent inorganic acids known to man. It has more and greater applications than sulfur dioxide, but not enough to take all the quantities produced. And it is still a high energy level, and it can do a lot of damage – the only difference being that it is liquid, not gaseous. Still, the solution for its deposit was to build special containers and bury them underground – except that, eventually the acid would dissolve the containers and contaminate the soil.

The problem was solved in an area that no one expected to offer any solution: the production of chemical fertilizers. The new agricultural technologies required the application of three elements to the soil: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash. Of these, phosphorus proved to be the most difficult to obtain. In nature, it can be found in great quantities in the deserts, where it exists in the form of a rock called “rock phosphate.” Chemically, it is calcium phosphate, a very stable compound which takes a lot of chemical energy to break up. But guess what: sulfuric acid breaks it relatively easy, producing as a result phosphoric acid, which is the active basis for the production of many phosphate-based products, from fertilizers to plastics and polymers to cleaning agents to food preservatives etc. Since phosphoric acid is so valuable, the process can take all of the produced sulfuring acid by the metallurgic plants, and ask for more. The other product from the production of phosphoric acid is calcium sulphate. Is it a pollutant? No. Calcium sulphate is the formula for gypsum – the same gypsum used as plaster in construction. (Well, to be precise, there are still remnant phosphate elements in it, which make it a bit more reactive, but new technologies will take care of it, I am sure.) So, from the highly toxic sulfur dioxide, technology can take us all the way to producing useful compounds for agriculture and the home and food production, and the only waste product is low energy enough to not be a pollutant. That’s the only way of dealing with pollution: use up all available energy.

And that takes higher and higher technologies. Not lower. Not stagnation in technological development. Not refraining from technological development even if we had it. Not refraining from higher productivity, or from mass production, or from lower prices, or from industrialization. Not a return to more primitive levels of social organization. (New York City, before the advent of the automobile, had to dispose of 2.5 million pounds of horse manure every day. Google “the great horse manure crisis of 1894” to learn more about it.) If pollution is unused, unharnessed energy, there is only one way of reducing it: develop the technologies that will be capable of harnessing of all available energy for productive use. Once you have them, you will have zero pollution, and at the same time, a highly developed and prosperous society.

Of course, that ultimate level of technological development can’t be reached directly from a primitive condition of no technology at all. We can’t just continue living in the old times when supposedly we had perfectly clean environment and organic foods and natural life (and the life expectancy was 40 years, of course), and expect that suddenly we will wake up one day having all the clean modern technologies. Each level of development builds the capital base for the next level. The steam engine couldn’t be build if it wasn’t for the effective use of animal power and wind power to build the capital base. The internal combustion engine couldn’t come around if it wasn’t for the steam engine to prepare the way for it. Nuclear technologies and electronics and turbines and the new materials that made them possible could only appear because the combustion engine helped the world become a more productive place. And our modern attempts at extracting clean energy out of sunlight and wind couldn’t happen unless we had more primitive chemical technologies to prepare the materials and the alloys needed for them. At every step, mankind, driven by the Dominion Mandate, has been trying to lower its costs of production, and in the process, has been building the base for newer and cleaner energies. Cleaner environment, therefore, came as the product of the Dominion Mandate. The more dominion man exercises, the less pollution he will produce.

The conclusion to our modern policies should be obvious. Ever since environmentalism became a fashionable ideology in the West, its impulse has been to lobby politicians to stop this or that technological development, because it would produce more pollution. This has been based on the erroneous assumption that better productivity leads to more pollution. But given the scientific facts, such a proposition is nonsensical; no one builds a better vessel to spill more water out of it. In the same way, no one builds a better technology to leave more unused energy out of it. Government intervention, then, to continue blocking the development of newer technologies, has been not in favor of less pollution but in favor of more pollution. And guess what: where the government controls the economy to block any private initiative, and any possibility for inventors to profit from their own inventions, the pollution levels have been unimaginable. The Soviet Union and the whole Eastern bloc were among the most polluted places on earth; the air in some cities was barely breathable, while at the same time their economy was barely producing, and their GDP per capita was 1/10 to 1/20 of that of the Western countries,. Pollution doesn’t come from less production; it comes from less efficient production,. When you lack the technology to produce more efficiently, you pollute more.

The Biblical solution to the problem of environmental cleanness should be then obvious: Free the way for individuals to fulfill the Dominion Mandate. Create the conditions for full market freedom for innovators to create better technologies and profit from them. Get the government out of the economy, and shut down all environmental organizations. Make it possible for the entrepreneurs to reap every single benefit of their increased productivity and efficiency. Remove any government protection and corporate welfare from any industry and make it compete on the basis entirely of price and quality; this will force them to seek ways to utilize every bit of energy available in nature to achieve their goals in a more efficient way.

The final result will be that the cannonball will roll its way downhill producing the maximum useful effect: it will rotate the maximum water wheels it can hit, and it will do it in the most efficient manner, with the maximum energy transformed into work. And it will never hit any other object and destroy it. It will be pure work.

And that’s the only way to prevent pollution. Anything else will only create more pollution, and finally, destruction.

The book I will recommend today is Abundance, by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler. In it, you will find the facts and the logic of a new and bright future, where the scarcity of older times – through which many of us have lived – will be replaced by abundance. The authors don’t connect that abundance to a spiritual cause, but we as Christian Reconstructionists know how to see through the material veneer to the spiritual causes. The book may be your most important extra-Biblical confirmation for what your postmillennial faith has already taught you.

And again, in your prayers and giving, consider Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission effort for creating the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe, through translating the best Christian books and materials for giving a comprehensive Gospel, covering all areas of life. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. God bless you all.

“Why patents”, you will ask, I am sure. You have never heard a sermon on patents in your church, right? If you open Sermon Audio and search for ‘patents,’ you will get ‘No matching sermon title found.’ Just like something we talked about before, the Right and Duty of Private Judgment. Well, the real scandal is about the Right and Duty of Private Judgment, of course, because it was a fundamental doctrine of the Reformation, so not finding anything on that topic shows the sorry state of what passes today for ‘evangelical’ or ‘Reformed’ or ‘Protestant’ churches in the US. It’s more natural to not find anything on patents, though, for patents . . . do they actually have any covenantal significance. Does the Bible speak of them at all?

And if you are rather confused why we should talk about patents in a podcast that is focused on covenantal, that is, ethical/judicial commentary on our modern world, it is because your ‘pastors’ or ‘leaders’ or ‘elders’ or whatever other self-designation they have, have never really made the effort to rise to the demands of their position and actually apply the Word of God to all of life. Patents are an important covenantal topic in our world today. They span over several areas of application of the Law of God, from the nature and purpose of scientific and technological development, through the nature of man as the agent of the Dominion Covenant, all the way to issues of property rights and theft, and also government interference, and specifically the executive state versus the Biblical, judiciary civil government. Studying patent law, and trying to discern good from evil in the modern patents laws, will give us a great deal of insight in many topics of Christian Reconstruction, and in expanding the Kingdom of God.

Patents, to be honest, have not been covered much by Christian Reconstructionist authors either. It is not because Christian Reconstruction, as a theological and intellectual movement, believes that patents are ethically or judicially neutral. To the contrary, we see every single part of human life and society as inherently religious, and therefore subject to the same spiritual laws and principles described in the Bible. (And ‘spiritual,’ if you remember the first episode of Axe to the Root, means ‘ethical/judicial.’) So the reason is not that we don’t see the area of patents and patent law as spiritual. It is rather that among the vast quantity of topics we are trying to cover, the topic of scientific and technological development has not been developed well enough, yet. We do have a general epistemological understanding that science and technology are only possible in the context of a Biblical worldview. We do have a philosophy of history that connects the prevalence of the Biblical worldview to the growth in inspiration in all areas of thought, including science and technology. It is not a pure coincidence that modern capitalism, with its better management of social resources and increased economic productivity first emerged in Protestant, and specifically Calvinist nations; for it to emerge, a specific set of beliefs is needed to become prevalent in the society. (Read my article on American vision titled, ‘Is There a Non-Christian Way to Fly a Plane?’) We have that general idea of the relation between the Christian faith and science and technology. However, we have not developed it in detail yet. Remember when I said in previous episodes that Rushdoony’s The Foundations of Social Order is the most unique book ever written in the history of Christendom, because it makes the connection between the theological development of the Christian faith and the social and political and judicial progress of the Western civilization, something that no Christian author has done before? Well, we need a similarly unique book for the foundations of scientific and technological progress. We haven’t gotten to it, yet. The comprehensive worldview that Christian Reconstruction sees in the Bible gives is such a vast array of topics to talk about that one generation of writers is not sufficient to cover all of them; and future generations will certainly have to cover topics that we today don’t even recognize as topics to start with.

In Axe to the Root, I will try to cover certain segments of the relation of the Biblical worldview to science and technology but I have to warn my listeners ahead of time: none of it will be as comprehensive and exhaustive as we need to develop it. As we are talking this week about patents, we will have to talk in part, and really short (in order to fit into the time frame) about science and technology and their relation to the Dominion Covenant. We will also need to get a closer look at the modern atheist/secularist view of science and technology and of their place in history. When we do that, we will see that secularism has a very specific religious view of science and technology. And when we see that, we will then be able to see that the modern patent laws are all based on that specific religious view of secularism. And once we see that, we will be able to understand the problem with them, as well as the Biblical solution to modern patent laws.

Let me first get something out of the way: are patents and patent laws important in our society? After all, we may be talking about a really small thing here, right?

Wrong. Take this: every year, inventors in the United States only file over 600,000 applications for patents with the US Patent and Trademark Office. Of these, about 350,000 get approved every year ‘ close to 1,000 a day. The total expenses for filing a patent until its approval can range from $10,000 to $100,000, with an average of about $35,000 a patent. Which means, if we only count the approved patents, we are looking at a whole industry of more than $12 billion a year. When we add the expenses on the unapproved patents, the total size of the industry may go well over $20 billion a year. To compare, the homeschool market ‘ literature, curricula, co-ops, online school, etc. ‘ is estimated at a little over $1 billion a year, and projected to reach $2.5 billion per year by 2020. The average annual work income of a patent attorney is estimated at $160,000 per year, and the average annual dividend of partners in patent law firms is estimated at over $500,000 a year. Are patents an important part of our economy and society? You bet. Just because we don’t see them mentioned too often doesn’t mean they are not important.

So, now, how do we approach the issue of patents from a Biblical perspective? And how do we analyze the modern patent legislation, its good sides, its bad sides, and the problems arising from them, and how do we look for Biblical solutions?

We start from analyzing the place of science and technology in the Bible, and the antithesis between the Biblical and the secularist view.

One common criticism used by atheists against the Bible is that the Bible never explicitly mentions science and technology. Therefore, the atheist argument goes, we can’t abide by it in our modern world, for it can’t really account for the complexity of our modern world which is so permeated and governed and conditioned by technology. The world is changing technologically, and therefore the moral and judicial rules must be changing, too. Therefore, Christians want to impose an outdated religion on the modern world. Unfortunately, the majority of Christians today have no answer to this claim, because they don’t have a comprehensive Biblical worldview. The Bible, indeed, doesn’t explicitly mention science and technology. It has no special moral rules for a world governed or conditioned by technology. So Christians who have no comprehensive, covenantal worldview, have no answer. The only answer you may hear from the pulpits from time to time is that God created all science and technology, and that science and technology can help the Gospel. But such answer is simply reactive, and it doesn’t provide an active interpretation and analysis of the rightful place of science and technology in God’s plan for history. After all, God created the sodomites too, and He has a place for them in His plan. But it is one thing to know that something is created by God, and another to know what place it has in God’s plan for history.

So what is the Biblical answer to this challenge? If it s true that our modern world has been so thoroughly changed by science and technology, and is so thoroughly governed by science and technology, while the Bible has nothing to say about that, what do we have to say about the modern world?

Science and technology are actually mentioned in the Bible. They are not mentioned in our modern cultural terms, as ‘science and technology.’ We will see a little bit later that our modern cultural terms are not really objective or morally neutral; they are the product of a specific worldview different from, and contrary to the worldview of the Bible. (Just the terms and their use, not science and technology themselves.) But the concepts of science and technology are central to the Biblical message in a covenantal way; central to such an extent, that the whole movement and direction of Biblical history are predicated on the centrality of science and technology to history.

In the Bible, however, science and technology go under their covenantal name: The Dominion Covenant.

One of the serious mistakes of modern Christianity ‘ including the Reformed, or the so-called ‘Reformed’ segment of it ‘ is to look at history as nothing more than the expression of God’s grace to sinners. As the Dutch theologian Klaas Schilder expressed it, in his book, Heaven: What Is It?, modern theologians tend to look at the original covenant, the Covenant of Work (as he calls it, instead of Covenant of Works), as a temporary covenant, while the Covenant of Grace is the eternal covenant, superseding the Covenant of Work. This is a serious mistake, Schilder said, and it is one that leads us astray. In his words, ‘the sequence of events must be explained by their beginning, if we would see whither they tend. . . . when we see the Covenant of Work as basic to all covenant relationship, we are on the right track.’

We don’t have the time to expand on this idea. I have talked about it in more detail in my sermon on Work. Translated, this means that we come to God not to just seek salvation. We come to God to be restored in His original intent for us, which is to take dominion over the earth as God’s representatives. Take dominion for what purpose? To put the earth and all its resources to productive use for a mankind that is growing to fill all the earth. (And its surroundings, perhaps.) The Garden was given as the initial capital for humanity. It had everything in it, capital goods (trees and animals), liquid assets (the rivers flowing out from the center of the Garden), monetary assets (gold and precious stones), and human capital (Adam and Eve were created as adult, mature beings, who could start learning and working and reproducing right away). If it wasn’t for the Fall, we would have had a mankind which developed science and technologies at an incredibly fast rate, to match its population growth.

In such a view, there is no special magic place for science and technology. Scientific and technological development, therefore, is just the natural state of a mankind that is not laboring under the burden of sin. And even under the burden of sin, mankind continues, in an imperfect way, developing science and technology. It’s work, like any other work; it is simply using the resources of God’s earth to increase productivity. And like any other work, it depends on many factors. One of the factors is the availability of human capital. A small population will only produce small advances in science and technology: an improved tool, a new ingredient to a metal alloy, an improved method of pasturing, etc. A larger population will have the larger brain power to apply to many areas at once and produce more advances, all other things being equal. This may be the reason for the apparent scientific lead of China and the Muslim world over Europe in the medieval period, which secularists today like to celebrate so much. Europe, after the devastation in the fall of the Roman Empire, plus several outbreaks of the plague, was a very sparsely populated continent compared to China or the Muslim world. Only in the 14th century, the continent lost about 40% of its population due to the plagues. And yet, on per capita basis, it still had a higher amount or science and technology produced compared to the Muslim world of China.

Which brings us to the other factor in scientific and technological development, namely, the religious and philosophical and ethical and judicial background that makes it possible. I am not going to expound too much on this, you can read my article, ‘Is There a Non-Christian Way to Fly a Plane?’, where I respond to Murray Rothbard’s challenge to us Christian Reconstructionists, on the religious foundations of science. I am going to jump straight to the conclusion, namely, that sustained scientific and technological progress is only possible in a culture that has the religious foundation ‘ the tenets of faith ‘ that, first, creates a foundation to legitimize science (philosophically and judicially), second, makes it intellectually and socially possible for individuals to do science, and, third, creates incentives for those who do science. Keep in mind that while China had many more scientific and technological discoveries, it was Europe that developed them practically and put them to everyday use. The best example of how the culture can kill inventions is the story told by Pliny the Elder about a Roman inventor who created a new metal from clay, shiny as silver but much lighter, and demonstrated it to emperor Tiberius. From the description, this was the first discovery of aluminum in Europe. However, Tiberius, who was afraid that such an invention would devalue his huge personal treasure of gold and silver, ordered that the inventor be put to death. It took another 1,800 years before aluminum was re-discovered. It was only Christianity that made it philosophically acceptable and socially possible not only to do science, but also apply it to technologies and thus improve the total productivity of the society.

From the perspective of the Bible, therefore, science and technology do not change the world, nor do they create a new world. The cause-and-effect relationship is the other way around: It is a world that is recreated and renewed that gives rise to scientific and technological progress. Science and technology do not appear out of magic; they emerge when a sufficient segment of society returns to obedience to the Dominion Covenant, and thinks, and works, and innovates accordingly. That’s the reason science and technology are not specifically mentioned in the Bible: because they are not a cause, they are only an effect. In the context of the Dominion Covenant, there is nothing separately unique or special or magic about them. The world has always had scientific and technological growth at all times, just like it has had any other kind of production or education or travel or roads or any other kind of activity. But a society which is faithful to the Covenant of God ‘ that is, the Dominion Covenant ‘ will eventually see a rise in all kinds of human activities, whether production or education or road building or art or music or . . . science and technology. The world today is not governed by science and technology, it employs them, because someone in the past has changed it and renewed it to make it possible. In covenantal terms, that is, in terms of ethics and justice, the world is just the same as it has always been, and there is no need for a new standard of good and evil.

And it is here where the antithesis is between the worldview of the Bible and the worldview of secularism and all anti-Biblical thought in general: Non-Christian religions and philosophies have no idea whatsoever where science and technology come from. Of course, in the first place, they don’t even have the explanation of why science should exist in the first place. Given a universe of no ultimate design or purpose, why should we expect such a universe to be favorable to man the more he studies and discovers its physical mysteries? Why should we expect any discovery to help increase man’s productivity and wealth, let alone all of them? This alone is a good question, an presuppositional apologists have dealt with it in detail. But the other question is even better: How does science and technology actually appear? What factor makes it appear? How is it that Scotland prior to the 17th century was a backwards nation on the edge of the civilized world, and the suddenly, for about 150 years, gave birth to a vast number of the world’s scientists and engineers, giving the world most of the inventions that fueled the Industrial Revolution? And how come today it is back to relative obscurity in terms of scientific inventions?

Not having any reliable ideology of why and how science and technology happen, non-Christians are reduced to a practical belief in science as some sort of a magic. In fact, popular movies today often promote the idea that what used to be known as ‘magic’ in times past, today is known as ‘science.’ But it’s not just the movies; even self-proclaimed rationalists like Isaac Asimov or Carl Sagan have promoted this idea in their books and articles. (To compare, the Bible specifically distinguishes between science and magic.) In the pre-Christian antiquity such magic was considered ‘black’ and malevolent; scientists could be suspected together with sorcerers of performing magic rituals and often executed in Greece and in Rome. It was Christianity that changed the views of the whole world concerning science and technology; by the end of the 19th century, almost all the pagan lands in the world had adopted the view of the superiority of science, and eagerly sought its fruits, even if they couldn’t plant its root. (The last major culture to surrender to the new view of science was, amazingly, Japan, after the Shoguns saw the destructive power of the Western ships and their guns.

Science and technology now became acceptable for unbelievers, but they still remain magic, and the factors producing science were still unclear. Karl Marx believed that scientific development was just a normal evolutionary development; when faced with the problem why some nations have it and others don’t, he ascribed it to genetic backwardness in some races, just like modern racists do. (Modern racism and nationalism is in fact old Marxism.) In other words, for Marx, genes somehow produced science and technology. The atheism emerging in the 19th century in fact promoted science from being just magic to the level of religion. It was in that period that the atheist dogma was born, ‘I don’t believe in God, I believe in science.’ That atheists needed a new religion to replace the one they rejected shouldn’t be of any surprise to any presuppositional thinker. That they chose science to be their new religion is nothing less than ironic; for the very science they chose to ‘believe in,’ was started and developed by the same Christian scientists whom they rejected and maligned. When the scientific method was being developed as a concept by several generations of scientists, and then crystallized by Isaac Newton, there wasn’t a single atheist thinker to add one single contribution to the work. What Christian scientists developed as a useful tool, atheists erected as their god. They may as well burn incense to a shovel; it would be just as meaningful. It was during that time that the concept of ‘nature’ was developed, as a self-existing, self-authenticating entity, to replace God. There is no god but nature, and science is its religion, became the dogma of the new secularists. (Read ‘The Myth of Nature,’ a small appendix to Rushdoony’s book, The Mythology of Science.)

Out of this religion of science or, as Rushdoony calls it, ‘the mythology of science’ came the belief that our modern world is somehow radically different from the older world, of that earlier mankind that knew no science. It is a sort of an Old Covenant / New Covenant situation: the Old Covenant is the old world that had no science, with just a few would-be scientists scattered here and there, and the New Covenant is the modern world where we have all this wonderful science. So just as the Christian New Covenant brings changes in the worship of God and in the application of His Law, in the same way, the new scientific world necessitates changes in the worship of the secularists gods, as well as changes in the morality of the times. And from there comes the claim that the Bible can’t be used for our modern world, because it has nothing about science in it. The magic has become a religion, and now Christianity and the Bible are assessed based on that religion, and are found to be ‘heretical’ according to the New Covenant of Science.

This so far was a rather long presuppositional background to the case of patents, but it was necessary for our understanding of modern patents. Why? Because, while the Bible views science and technology as just another activity of man in his Dominion Covenant, modern patent legislation views science and technology as an activity of a higher order, something very special that is over and above any other human activity. And since science is the new religion, expected to bring us redemption from the older, unredeemed state of lower science and lower technology, the modern governments make legislation about science turn into a special religious ritual. In some countries, even the official language of government legislation is unashamedly religious. In Canada, for example, one can’t work as an engineer unless being licensed and accepted as a member of a local engineering association, and some of these associations bear the names ‘orders,’ like the religious orders of the Roman Church. This licensing and acceptance is done through a secret ceremony (yes, a secret ceremony) involving a sort of secular religious oath to the order. Similar requirements are in force in other western countries as well, and in the US, there is also an organization called Order of the Engineer, which copies the Canadian religious rites for becoming an engineer. But it doesn’t stop there. Think of the graduation ceremonies in the modern colleges: from the special priestly robes to the speech (like a sermon) to the special rituals, they are all a reflection of that new religion of science.

And because modern governments look at science as some sort of a new and special magic, or even a religion of the modern world, that’s why modern patent legislation is designed so as create a completely new system of morality and justice in respect to science.

The presumed purpose of patent laws is this: Patent laws are meant to give incentive to researchers and inventors to make their discoveries and inventions open to the public. According to some interpretations, that’s the meaning of the word ‘patent,’ from the Latin verb patere, ‘reveal, lay open, make obvious.’ (Actually, the true origin is different, but that’s another story altogether.) The incentive given to them is a monopoly on the economic benefits stemming from their inventions and discoveries ‘ and sometimes even benefits from the non-economic use of them. The purpose, therefore is entirely pragmatic: the concern is not so much with property rights as with the expected public benefit from science and technology. Is this a problem?

This is actually the first and most important problem with modern patents: in their desire to create pragmatic incentives for inventors to make their inventions public (which stems from their view of technology as some sort of extraordinary, magic power), modern legislators ignore the justice of property rights in favor of pragmatic considerations. How so? Patent law grants exclusive rights not to the inventor himself but to the first person to apply for a patent. There is no real process to discover whether the filer is the same as the inventor. If an engineer works hard to develop a new process or a new machine, and a patent lawyer steals his plans and files for a patent, the patent will be granted to the lawyer, not to the inventor, because there is no legislation that allows for restoring the property rights of the inventor. This is an extreme case, of course, but another case has been awfully common over the last 150 years: when several inventors independently develop the same invention, and the one with the most unscrupulous lawyers and the most money gets the patent. This was the case with the telephone patent granted to Alexander Graham Bell. The concept of transmitting voice over long distances using electrical signals (also known at the time as sound telegraph or harmonic telegraph) was known to many people, and a number of inventors worked on it, and some were ahead of Alexander Bell. Some even had proven working prototypes years before Bell even had his plans completed, like Daniel Drawbaugh. (Drawbaugh was such a genius, he was one of the first to figure out how to use radiowaves to create a wireless telephone; his first prototype could work within 4 miles from the transmitter.) But while Bell was well-positioned as a university professor to use financing and legal services from his students’ parents, Drawbaugh was a redneck living in the woods who could never save enough money to file his patent. Before Bell filed his patent application in 1876, the Patent office received a number of ‘patent caveats,’ that is, a number of inventors were declaring their working on it independently. Apparently, there was no danger that any of them would hide their invention and not reveal it to the public. Thus, there was really no need for granting an exclusive patent to anyone, because the professed purpose of the patent laws was achieved even without a patent. But the Office eventually granted the patent to Alexander Graham Bell, effectively shutting all other research work. The monopoly of that unnecessary patent translated into a monopoly over all telephone service in the US and Canada by the Bell companies. Despite the claims by the leadership of Bell that this was for the better, the monopoly actually slowed down the technological progress in that particular area. In 1974, the year when that monopoly was finally broken, and competitors were allowed, the quality of telephone services was not awfully much different than it was 50 years earlier. Almost all the technological progress in that are ‘ including cell phones ‘ happened after the break up of that monopoly. America could have had cell phones as early as WWII, if it wasn’t for the patent granted to Alexander Graham Bell.

In short, in its professed purpose to make inventions available to the public, the state trampled on property rights and liberty, created an artificial monopoly which in turn stifled technological progress, contrary to the original professed purpose. You can’t have progress where liberty and property rights are destroyed.

The weird religious character of the philosophy behind modern patent laws is even better visible in the fact that it allows for patenting even a theoretical idea without its practical application. And thus, anyone who has the same theoretical idea but decides to develop it practically, will have to pay royalties to the guy who patented the theoretical idea but never developed it. Yes, even if it could be proven that the real inventor developed it independently. Thus, if 150 years ago someone decided to patent the vague theoretical idea that blades or vanes attached at an angle to a rotating axis could produce airflow (what we today know as fan), he could patent it without developing it in practice, and then everyone who actually developed it had to pay him a fee. And this actually happened in the United States, and it happened to the Ford Company in its very first years. In 1895, George B. Selden, a patent lawyer and son of the same powerful political attorney Henry Selden who defended Susan Anthony in court, filed for a patent for an automobile driven by internal combustion. His project was rather primitive and never tested in practice; it was the idea that was being patented. When the first makers of real working cars appeared in America, Selden used his patent to extort fees from them on every sold automobile. Henry Ford, however, refused to pay, which led to the most publicized court case in the first decade of the 20th century. The judge decided in Selden favor, declaring that the patent covered every automobile propelled by an engine powered by gasoline vapor. Henry Ford appealed by putting up a bond at the gigantic for the time sum of $350,000, and 8 years later won. One of the factors for the win was that Selden was never able to produce a working prototype of his patent. But he was granted that patent nevertheless!

The lunacy of this characteristic of patents can be clearly seen when we compare it to property rights in other areas. For example, land ownership. Imagine the era of the Homestead Act. Huge tracts of land, never explored and never settled. People who want their piece of land can get all their belongings and move to that piece of land, and claim it as their own, after they have built their house on it and have a plow on it. Once they do that, they can go to the nearest title office and lay claim to their 160 acres of land.

Now imagine a person who just walks into a title office and gives the geographical coordinates of a lot and asks for a title on it. He has never been to it. He has never seen it. He has never applied any kind of tool to it, whether a plow or an axe or a pickaxe. He only has the theoretical coordinates, and that’s it. Or, to make the analogy even closer, not just a lot but a whole region. (Because a theoretical idea might involve much more than a single specific invention.) And then, when other people move into that region, he sues them for rent, even though he has never been in that region, and has never done anything to improve the conditions of life in it.

That’s how the modern patents on theoretical ideas look like. And they certainly don’t help science and technology. To the contrary, they stifle scientific progress. As Henry Ford testified concerning George Selden, [QUOTE]’It is perfectly safe to say that George Selden has never advanced the automobile industry in a single particular…and it would perhaps be further advanced than it is now if he had never been born.'[END OF QUOTE] Well, it would be perfecly safe for us to say that if patent legislation didn’t allow a patent to be granted for just a theoretical idea, George Selden wouldn’t be able to cause the damage he did.

We shouldn’t be surprised by such results, however. Once government legislation is based on a false religion, we should expect that whatever good intentions are claimed by that legislation, the opposite results will come around. Marxism professed to defend the workers’ class against the rich capitalists; what it created was a system that exploited the workers more than any capitalist has ever exploited them, without any hope of negotiations for better conditions or wages. The apartheid in South Africa professed to defend the rights of the poor whites (contrary to what many today believe, the apartheid was a socialist system), and yet it produced a permanently poor white class chained to a life of dependency and lack of vision or purpose for their lives. Labor legislation in the US proposed to improve the conditions of the factory workers, and yet it led to a mass exodus of jobs as American companies gave up on negotiating with the unions and the government and outsourced to other countries. We see the same process going on now with Trump’s administration: most of his policies that are supposed to ‘put America first,’ in practrice only hurt American citizens, families, and companies.

In the same way, as patent legislation was proposed to lead to faster pace of scientific and technological growth, in the majority of cases, it only stifled growth, as inventors spend more time and resources running the race to get monopoly grants from bureaucrats to kill all competition, rather than develop their ideas in practice and making them available, serving as many people as possible, and making money in the process.

There’s more to be said about it, but we don’t have the time. Hopefully, the main presuppositional antithesis is clear.

What is the Bible’s solution to all this?

The Dominion Covenant, in the first place, doesn’t presuppose anything magical or special about the invention process. It is work like any other dominion work, whether tilling the earth or making a tool. There have always been new inventions in history; for example, Lynn White, in his book on Medieval Technology and Social Change about several such inventions. There’s nothing so special about thiose inventions as to claim that the world is ethically changed by them so as to require a new system of ethics. To the contrary, science and technology themselves are the product of an already changed world. There is no need for new and special laws to protecct inventions, and certainly, there is no need for new and special laws to pragmatically encourage scientists and inventors to publicize their inventions anymore than there is a need for new and special laws to encourage farmers to work their land and take produce to the market. Just like a farmer is foced by the market ‘ by the competition of other farmers ‘ to produce, if he wants to stay ahead of other farmers who are his competitors, in the same way an inventor is forced to make his inventions public. The risk is that if he keeps them secret, his competitors can develop their own alternatives and get a lead over him on the market. Competition in the free market, not monopolies in a closed market is what brings the best productivity and ingenuity out of people.

Property rights still have to be defended, if justice is to be maintained. But just like everywhere else in the economy, property rights do not apply to general concepts. Group property over general concepts have always been characteristic for pagan religions, and has been at the foundation of collectivism and injustice. The Masai of East Africa, for example, believe that they were granted, by their god, an exclusive right over all cattle on the earth. That is, they have the patent on all cattle. Thus, all non-Masai who hold cattle are in a state of ‘patent infringement.’ Over the centuries, this has been the practical justification for the raids the Masai have conducted against their neighbors for stealing cattle. As of today, the Masai have the largest number of cattle per capita of all cultural and national groups on the planet, because of their predatory practices, fueled by their mythology. While we may laugh at the backwardness of their beliefs, let’s not forget that it was the same beliefs that supported George Selden’s general patent on the idea of the automobile. If anything, the Masai were more justified in their beliefs, given that they can practically prove that they are among the most skilled cattle herders on the planet. US patents don’t require such skills, as was obvious from Selden’s example.

Thus, property rights, if they are to be protected, should only apply to specific practical inventions and scientific developments whose author and owner can be clearly proven. If several inventors develop something ‘ like the ceiling fan ‘ independently of each other, then each one has property rights only over his own specific plans and draftings and diagrams. That is, his being a few days ahead of his competitors doesn’t constitute a moral right of being the owner over their independent inventions. (Besides, could it be that he was a few days ahead only because his concept was of lower quality and needed less time to develop? If so, then a patent would only harm the consumers.) Independent inventions of the same concept must be treated as indepenent and all given the right to be marketed and make profit for their creators.

Theft, then, in such a judicial system, will constitute only the stealing of specific prepared plans to use them against the wishes of their owner. While no one can prove that an idea was stolen from his brain, proving that specific plans and draftings and notes were stolen is much easier. If the specific plans for a ceiling plan of one inventor suddenly appear in the production line of a company, and it is known that that company had access to his workshop or draft room, then the theft is clearly proven.

There was actually such a case in the 1960s and the 1970s, involving the same Ford Motor Co. we talked about earlier. In 1964, Robert Kearns, a former CIA agent, filed a patent for intermittent shield wipers for cars. The electrical diagram he submitted was very clear (you can find it online: Patent US 3602790 A) and it was ingenious and unique. It was also working, for he had created several working prototypes and they were proven to work. He immediately contacted Ford Motor Company and Chrysler, trying to sell to them his invention or at least license it in a joint venture with them. Both companies rejected his request, but kept the plans, and a couple of years later started installing his system on all of their cars. Kearns then took them to court. He defeated Ford Motor Company in court for a verdict of $10 million, and later defeated Chrysler for a verdict of $20 million. By 1995, he was a rich man thanks to the dishonest practices of the two automakers and his court victories against them.

But in his case, there was a specific diagram and specific working prototypes. Ford here were not dealing with a George Selden-type patent vulture, they were dealing with a real inventor who had provable rights over his invention. Kearns’s case is the best example of how we are supposed to protect the property rights of inventors, without stifling competition and slowing down progress. Property rights only over specific property, against provable cases of theft.

More can and must be said, but it will be in a future episode. To summarize, the modern patent law is based on fallacious presuppositions: that science and technology are a sort of magical activity in the world, and therefore have some magical impact on society, creating the need for a completely new system of justice and righteousness. For this reason, modern laws protecting patents don’t really protect property rights; they rather encourage theft and unscrupulousness. The result is that they really stifle the invention process. A Biblical solution to the problem is to treat science and technology as just another human activity in the cotext of the Dominion Covenant, and apply to them the Biblical rules for protecting property: property is specific goods and services created by specific individuals, not general ideas or concepts without any practical utility. Only then we will have both the incentive to innovate and the freedom to apply it, for a world of better productivity.

The book I will asign for rading this week is R.J. Rushdoony, The Mythology of Science. Science, as you should know by now, is not religiously or morally neutral. It stems from specific presuppositions and tenets of faith. When the Christian faith is lost, science becomes nothing more than magic. And when magic becomes the foundation of legislation, it produces disaster.

Keep in your prayers and in your giving Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization devoted to planting the seeds for a future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe through translating and publishing books that teach the comprehensive application of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to all of life. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. God bless you all.

Welcome to Episode 65 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes I will try to fix a gap in my teaching for the last 20 years. That gap is the interpretation of 1 Cor. 11:2-16: Paul’s injunction about women’s head-covering in the church. When I say gap, I don’t mean that I had taught a fallacious interpretation of the passage. As a matter of fact, I had no interpretation at all. I had been asked many times about my interpretation, especially by women, and especially by women who are sensitive about abuse of power in the church. But I always replied that I hadn’t gotten to that passage yet. I had nothing to say. I knew all the official interpretations – especially the so-called “Reformed” ones, by respected Reformed preachers. I couldn’t buy into any of them, though. All of them seemed quite out of character for Paul in his other epistles, and even in that same epistle of 1 Corinthians. All of them seemed to interpret the text quite out of the context: these several chapters of 1 Corinthians treat the topic of the church as one body, with everyone in it, male or female, equal in honor and dignity, and all these interpretations – even by the most respectable Reformed theologians and preachers, seemed to take this passage out of context and interpret it as if half of the church – the women, had lower honor and dignity. In addition, there was nothing ethical or judicial in the interpretations I was hearing: they were all focused on the liturgical trappings of head-covering as if they were the real thing; and I knew from both Biblical common sense and from experience that women can outwardly cover their heads and yet despise their husbands, and other women could never put on any covering and yet were pious and orderly in their conduct. Thus, head-covering certainly doesn’t correspond to the reality these preachers and theologians wanted to ascribe to it. And as far as I am concerned, when you interpret a passage for me, you better give me the ethical/judicial reality behind it that I can apply today, or I don’t buy into your interpretation. An interpretation that confuses liturgical symbols with ethical/judicial reality is not my cup of tea, thank you very much. I am a Reconstructionist; I need to know what covenantal issues are behind the passage. Symbolism is fine and nice, but symbolism is not real theology. Tell me what the passage says to justice and righteousness, and tell it in ways that account for both the historical context and the clear and precise grammatical meaning. 

Speaking of historical context and grammatical meaning, we have all adopted the claim that the historical-grammatical method is the best “conservative” method for interpreting the Bible. That is, the method that looks at the grammatical structure of the text and its direct and plain meaning, and then at the historical context and what the text would have meant for its contemporary readers. And then, of course, the interpreter, after he has discovered the grammatical meaning and the historical meaning in context, may try to discover what ethical/judicial application there is in that text for us today, of if there is such modern application at all. This is where I have my doubts about the historical-grammatical method: While the concept is good, it has been used by modern Reformed churchmen not to really interpret texts but to interpret covenant applications away. I have listened to tons of lectures and sermon where the preacher, claiming to be “sola scriptura,” conservative, Reformed, expository, and whatnot, takes a Biblical passage and builds a long, boring, pseudo-intellectual treatise on it, going into excruciating detail about alleged historical facts and context (most of them imaginary or anachronistic), only to leave his listeners with no modern application, or with false application, or with an “application” that in reality denies any real application. Modern so-called “Reformed” preachers have done this to the Law of God, to the mandate of engaging in issues of justice (politics), to the current validity of the gifts of the Spirit, to Biblical texts that refute modern concepts of ecclesiology and church government, etc. In general, because of this use of the historical-grammatical method for such massive abuse of preaching and leadership in the churches today, I am somewhat suspicious of its real worth. Perhaps I would make it only an element, and the real method should be ethical/judicial, that is, if the interpretation is correct historically/grammatically, but there is no ethical/judicial application for today, or if that application is contrary to the grand Biblical framework of ethics and justice, then the interpretation must be considered false by default. Put it in a different way, as a method, the historical/grammatical approach tends to fragment theology and Biblical knowledge into small unconnected parts of useless intellectual information. In order for it to work, it must be part of another method, one that by default looks at the Bible as a complete picture of covenantal, ethical/judicial system, and only use historical and grammatical information to place the pieces of the puzzle in their places. The historical/grammatical approach is not a consistent system in itself; it needs systematic organizing, and it must come from another method. Otherwise, it is simply used to interpret away modern applications of Biblical truths. 

Anyway, my goal here is not to give a total breakdown of the historical-grammatical method. But I do remember a rather ironic occurrence related to it and the passage in 1 Cor. 11. A little over 10 years ago, when we attended a well-known Reformed church, the Sunday school one Sunday morning was devoted to the historical-grammatical method. (Now, I will never understand why, in the modern “Reformed” churches, the Sunday school is where real deep – relatively deep, of course – theology is taught, while the main sermon is at the level of complete morons, reaching sometimes as high as second grade in the government school. My only suspicion is that the so-called “Reformed” seminaries have become proficient in cranking out moron after moron to man the pulpits.) The elder who was teaching had the reputation of very well prepared theologically, he had read tons of those fat theological books with tons of Greek and Latin words and quotes from dead Germans, so he certainly knew what he was talking about. He explained the historical-grammatical method perfectly well and yet simple enough for all of us to understand it, gave a few small examples, and finally turned the mike over to us for question. A lady of the audience almost ran to the mike and asked the first question, which also turned out to be the last, because the answer exhausted our remaining time: “Can you give us an example by applying the historical-grammatical method to 1 Cor. 11:2-16, the passage about head-covering for women?” What happened next was not surprising to me: The elder in question took back the mike and talked for another 10 minutes . . . without getting even close to giving an answer to the question. We just heard another lecture – or mini-lecture – on the historical-grammatical method, but e didn’t hear how it applied specifically to the passage in 1 Cor. 11. The time was then out, and we were dismissed to prepare for the real service. Now, I understand why he was reluctant to reply: His seminary had only taught him to use the method to explain or interpret away Biblical passages, like the Law of God, the gifts of the Spirit, the Great Commission, etc., and he could do those without any effort. The problem is, the passage in 1 Cor. 11 is a cherished one by modern churchmen, for it is an issue of power to them, and they don’t want to explain or interpret that one away. That one has to stay and be applied as it is, without any regard to historical or grammatical context; the only context must be the power games played in the modern churches, of which the gender games are a significant part. So, he couldn’t apply the historical-grammatical method to this specific passage without engendering doubts about its application today. That’s why he steered clear of it. 

You may want to disagree with my assumptions about his motives – although, I think I have had enough encounters with churchmen and am familiar enough with their religion of power to both discern their motives and predict their behavior in such circumstances. But what you can’t disagree with is that we still don’t have a true historical-grammatical interpretation of the passage under question. Every single sermon you will hear will be based on the same anachronistic assumptions: about the psychology of the women in the Corinthian church, about the psychology of the men in the Corinthian church, about the gender norms in the Greco-Roman society, about the meaning of the head-covering vis-à-vis the issue of authority, etc. “Anachronistic” means “out of time,” that is, all Reformed preachers and theologians apply to the text their modern norms and stereotypes and interpretations of symbols, instead of trying to view the text through the eyes of 1st century Romans or Greeks. In addition, the Greek text contains several grammatical and logical problems for the modern dominant interpretations of it, and yet, for all the claims of modern Reformed scholars, none of them has ever tried to resolve them, or at least comment on their problematic nature for their interpretation of the text. As a whole, we don’t have any reliable covenantal interpretation of the text in 1 Cor. 11:2-16. 

I didn’t have one either, for I didn’t know much about certain aspects of the Greco-Roman culture. Until recently, when a dear friend of mine sent me a book by Cynthia Long Westfall, Paul and Gender, where, in the first chapter, the author takes a detailed historical look at these details in the classical society of the 1st century, and provides the needed historical context for the correct Biblical interpretation of the text. After reading her book, I am convinced we now have what we need to construct a true ethical/judicial interpretation of Paul’s intention. Please, bear with me. I don’t claim this is the final interpretation of this text, and I don’t claim I can develop such final interpretation. But I do think that this is a good start for developing something much better than what Reformed theologians have offered us so far. Semper reformanda. 

Let me read the passage in question to you all: 

Now I praise you because you remember me in everything and hold firmly to the traditions, just as I delivered them to you. But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of a woman, and God is the head of Christ. Every man who has something on his head while praying or prophesying disgraces his head. But every woman who has her head uncovered while praying or prophesying disgraces her head, for she is one and the same as the woman whose head is shaved. For if a woman does not cover her head, let her also have her hair cut off; but if it is disgraceful for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, let her cover her head. For a man ought not to have his head covered, since he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of man. For man does not originate from woman, but woman from man; for indeed man was not created for the woman’s sake, but woman for the man’s sake. Therefore the woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels. However, in the Lord, neither is woman independent of man, nor is man independent of woman. For as the woman originates from the man, so also the man has his birth through the woman; and all things originate from God. Judge for yourselves: is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered? Does not even nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a dishonor to him, but if a woman has long hair, it is a glory to her? For her hair is given to her for a covering. But if one is inclined to be contentious, we have no other practice, nor have the churches of God. 

I am surely not going to have the time to cover all the little details in the passage. But I at least will try to cover the whole picture behind it. The historical-grammatical picture, I mean. 

The common modern interpretation, given by a number of supposedly Reformed commentators, takes this passage to be a sort of rant against feminism. To start with, what laid as the foundation for the passage is the belief that in the early church and in the society, the head-covering signified a “symbol of authority” over one’s head – an assumption that has never been proven by any commentator, but used only axiomatically. I mean, after all, if our modern culture understands head-covering as a “symbol of authority” over the woman’s head, surely the Greco-Roman culture would have had the same understanding, right? Then the assumption is that the Corinthian church must have had a number of women who refused to wear that symbol of authority over them when they were at church, and thus must have revealed themselves as rebels against authority. So the apostle in these verses decided to straighten it out and, speaking to those women, he commands them to wear head-covering as a symbol of their submission to men, or, otherwise, they better shave their heads. That’s the way the passage is read today, and that’s the way many commentaries read it. It is read as an injunction to women to submit. In short, the passage is interpreted as an issue of liturgy (symbolic meaning of clothes) and power (submission of women to men and establishing men’s superiority in the church). So, there, Paul must be speaking against feminism in that passage. 

The problem is, there are several grammatical problem with this interpretation, problem that are always avoided by the commentators. The first and most important one is the fact that the Greek text doesn’t say that the woman should have a symbol of authority over her or over her head. The direct Greek reading of the text has nothing about “symbol,” and the preposition is not “over” but “on.” The Greek epi signifies not indirect contact, as if the authority is someone else’s and is over her, but plain and direct possessive. That is, grammatically, the verse must be read, “the woman must have authority on her,” which means her authority displayed publicly, not someone else’s authority symbolized by her clothing. 

Another problem is the mention of angels. Why are angels mentioned at all, and why are they mentioned in relation to that alleged symbol of authority the woman has to have over her head? What, angels feel uneasy when a woman claims authority? Perhaps even blush in embarrassment? Well they better get used to it, because earlier in that same epistle, 1 Cor. 6:3, Paul says that the saints – which includes both male and female – will judge angels. Why would Paul mention angels, if all he means to tell women to symbolize submission? 

Another problem – may be not as major but surely indicative, is the gender of the words “anyone” and “contentious” in verse 16: In Greek, both words have gender, and it is masculine. That is, if any man wants to be contentious, not any woman. If Paul was speaking to women, his use of masculine would be grammatically awkward in Greek. It rather sounds like he has a bone to pick not with the women in the church but with the men. 

Yet another problem is the fact that the words translated “we have no other practice,” in Greek are actually, “we have no such practice.” What is the practice they don’t have, and what churches of God is Paul speaking about? 

To this we need to add some problems related to the Biblical context. I already mentioned the fact that is the passage was a command to women to assume a lower status in the church by symbolizing submission, this is in contradiction with the larger context of 1 Cor. 9-14. The greater passage actually speaks of the opposite, that in the church as one body, all are equal in standing before God, and there is no hierarchy between genders. Even the instructions about maintaining order in the assembly in ch. 14 mention nothing of church hierarchy: Paul could have instructed the elders to restore discipline when prophets get out of hand, but he doesn’t do such a thing, his instructions are to all worshipers. We also have the fact that in the Bible, the head-covering doesn’t necessarily signify submission to authority. For example, in Genesis 38:15, Judah assumed that Tamar was a harlot, because she had a veil over her head. If the veil was automatically a symbol of submission to authority, this verse doesn’t make any sense. Etc, etc. There are a number of other problems with the dominant interpretation of the passage in 1 Corinthians, and I won’t have the time to mention them all. 

What is more important is that none of these has ever been addressed by modern Reformed theologians and preachers. The dominant interpretation is taken for granted, and so carved into the minds of their listeners – mainly because there is no alternative to it – that the theologians can get away with overlooking the problems with it. No one asks any questions anyway, so why bother, if everyone accepts it? Perhaps some woman may ask a question about the historical-grammatical method applied – like the one I witnessed – but hardly anyone would even notice that no answer was given. The dominant interpretation wins by default, whether it is true or not, and whether the grammar and the historical context support it or not. 

But all these problems with the dominant interpretation fade when compared to the greatest problem, namely, the historical context of the time. And specifically, the cultural and legal norms of the Greco-Roman society, specifically about the head-covering and its meaning in the society. Let me state this greatest problem directly, and then I will develop it further, to show how a complete different and even opposite interpretation of Paul’s intentions is forced upon us by the text, when read in the context of 1st century Corinth. Ready for it? Here it is: 

In the Greco-Roman society, the veil or the head-covering did NOT symbolize submission to authority. Exactly the opposite: it indicated possession of authority by the one wearing the veil, while an uncovered head was an indicator for lack of authority or submission. 

The veil in the Classical society was limited, by custom, and even by law, to the upper classes in the society. It was a cultural privilege to wear it, and eventually was made a legal privilege. Only women of higher rank were allowed to wear a veil or a head covering. Women of lower ranks, slave women, prostitutes, etc., were by law prohibited from wearing a veil. Their heads were supposed to remain uncovered as a symbol of their submission to authority. Yes, you heard that right: it was an uncovered head that was a symbol of submission, not a covered head. Thus, Paul couldn’t be talking about women covering their heads as a symbol of submission to authority, for in the Greco-Roman culture of Corinth (a Greek city populated by Roman citizens) such connection would be not only not understood, but would be completely opposite to the cultural norms and to the expectations of his readers. Not only that, but Paul wouldn’t even have to command the women to cover their heads: they would do it gladly, on their own accord, for covering their heads would be a declaration of higher social status, not lower. Thus, it is absolutely absurd to imagine that rebellious, authoritarian women in the church in Corinth would be refusing to cover their heads; if anything, a rebellious woman who desires to establish her own authority would do exactly the opposite: she would cover her head and face as a statement that she is a woman of authority and she is outside the control and authority of anyone around her. 

It is this simple historical fact that completely destroys the modern anti-feminist interpretations of 1 Cor. 11:2-16. If we apply the historical-grammatical method, the grammatical part of it creates doubts about the validity of that interpretation. But the historical part destroys it completely. Paul commanding the women to have their heads covered would be the modern equivalent of commanding women to only wear the priciest and most beautiful clothes, and have tons of jewelry on them every time they go to church – otherwise, if they just go in plain clothes and no make up and no jewelry, they would be “rebellious.” Head-covering was an indication of social status, and it was legally banned for the women of the lower classes. Every woman in Corinth at the time would want to be free to have head-covering all the time. Only some were legally allowed to have it. 

The reason for this is the view of men and women the Roman society had. It had no law of sexual morality; marriage was considered a divine institution only for the upper classes. Even there, chastity was expected of the wives but not of the husbands. The husbands were pretty much free to take sexual advantage of any woman of lower rank or unprotected by an authority. Just like in the slave society in the American South where it was an established custom that the slave owners would take sexual advantage of their female slaves, all the while expecting their wives to maintain a Christian view of chastity. In such a society, only women of higher rank and authority are out of bounds, and in the Roman society, such rank and authority was signified by a veil or a head covering. The women who were expected to be sexually available were supposed to keep their heads uncovered. For the men in the society, it was an issue of power: the veil was a limit to their power, and therefore where they could legally exercise their power, the veil was legally banned. 

A similar situation was present in Islam. We think today that the veil there is a symbol of submission. The reality is, for the women, it is a symbol of authority. In the first years of the Muslim religion, Mohammed decreed that all women should be veiled; the reason was that his soldiers harassed and sometimes abused women who were in public. His soldiers protested against the rule; they wanted women to go around with uncovered heads, as a symbol of submission. Eventually, a deal was struck between Mohammed and his soldiers, in which slave girls and other women of low rank were not allowed to be veiled. The privilege was reserved only for married women of higher rank. The same situation persisted in the Ottoman Empire until the 19th century. Since the hijab and the burka were rather inconvenient for work in the field, a woman wearing them declared that she was a woman of means and authority, because she didn’t have to work like a commoner. 

In the Roman Empire, the Roman Law actually made a a difference between rape of a woman of higher rank and of a woman of lower rank. Raping a woman of lower rank was not a crime, and the blame was usually thrown on the woman – modern Shariah took that concept straight from the Roman Law. When it comes to raping a woman of higher rank, some rules in the Roman Law specifically prescribed that if the woman was dressed as lower class – that is, with her head uncovered – this would put corrections on the guilt of the rapist, and may be even get him off the hook, because it is assumed that he must have thought the woman was sexually available for abuse, because she had no veil. 

This significance of the veil worked for the men, too. The Roman men prayed to their gods and performed their religious sacrifices with veils over their heads; check out, for example that well-known statue of the veiled Augustus as a religious leader (pontifex maximus). But a pagan doesn’t approach his gods with a symbol of submission; the principle of communicating with pagan gods is opposite to the principle of communicating with the God of the Bible. A pagan worshiper approaches his gods as a man of authority approaches another man of authority; the prayer and the sacrifice are not ones of submission but of bargaining between men of equal power. The pagan gods don’t speak to the lowest in the culture; they only speak to men in power. And the veil was such a symbol of power on the heads of the Roman pagan priests, and subsequently, the emperors as priests. Among the Tuareg tribes in the North African desert, it is the men who are veiled as a symbol of authority, while the women are not veiled. The principle extended into medieval Europe, and even as late as the 20th century a man standing in the presence of his superiors was expected to remove his hat as a symbol of deference. (“My hat is off to you,” remember that expression?) Only a few chosen men coming from families of power had the privilege to remain with their hats on in the presence of the French kings. We can bring in even more historical examples, but the main point must be understood: the head covering was a privilege, not a burden, and certainly not a symbol of submission in the Roman Empire. It makes no sense to declare that rebellious women would refuse to wear it. And therefore, it makes no sense to believe that Paul was really addressing some rebellious, feminist women. Such a thought is absurd. 

Then who was Paul addressing? Obviously, the men in the church. The men in the church who wanted to keep the women from covering their heads. 

The Christian teaching brought a radical change in the cultural views concerning gender and the views of men and women in the society. In Christ, there was no higher rank and lower rank; all were the same rank. In fact, that very same chapter 11 of 1 Corinthians speaks of that problem when Paul covers the subject of the Lord’s Supper. Some come earlier and eat all of the food,  others come later. Why. Well, some are rich and can afford to come earlier. Others are workers and can’t come until after the work day is over. By telling them that they have to wait for each other, and eat together, Paul basically destroyed the meaningfulness of any rank and class distinctions in the church. 

Combined with the sexual ethics of Christianity, this would mean that women of lower social status would rank equal to women of higher social status. Put it bluntly, there was to be no more sexual availability of women based on their status, and symbolized by their lack of covering. It is to be expected that ij the church, even the converted prostitutes would want to have their heads covered, as a symbol of their newly acquired authority as priests of God in Christ. This is where the line about the angels is explained: the head covering ascribes a status of authority to all women, and since the angels are to be judged by all the saints (including women) and since they are serving spirits to those who inherit salvation (including women), then no woman should be in the Lord’s assembly stripped of her authority. 

But the Greco-Roman society was a society based on the ethics of power, not on the power of ethics. The laws were made so as to establish the power relationships in the society; the Roman society was very close to some modern power-based societies like the Mafia or the bureaucratic-military institutions of today. The men in the church of Corinth were all from pagan background, and it would be natural that the customs and habits of the power-based society would still be alive in their hearts. Such men would object to all women covering their heads in the church. Even if they had no intention to claim that the women should be sexually available, they would still insist that the law is the law, and therefore women who are banned from covering their heads in public shouldn’t cover their heads in the church either. 

But Paul’s position is clear: by insisting that some women shouldn’t cover their heads, you are disgracing them. More than that, you are degrading them based on the cultural stereotypes and the legal rules of the pagan society around you; you may as well shave their heads. If you are not allowing them the authority they have in Christ to be fully manifested in the Church, you are declaring them second-class citizens of the Kingdom of God. And there is no such thing as a second-class citizen in the Kingdom of God; women are just as valuable, and honored, and clothed with authority as you, powerful men. Even those women of lower rank, the weakest members of your society which worships power and despises weakness. In fact, specifically those women of lower rank, for it is in the least of the least that the power of Christ is made manifest. So, cease trying to limit the liberty of these women; let them have – as a principle of justice in the Kingdom of God – the symbol of authority on their heads. Not a symbol of someone else’s authority over them, but the symbol of their own authority before the world and even before the angels. 

And any man wants to fight about it, Paul says, we in Israel, and the churches of God in the Jewish diaspora, we have no such custom about veiling, either way. The issue is not one you men should be fighting about. There are more important things. 

There are other issue to be covered as well, but we won’t have the time. My purpose was to cover only the issue of women’s covering ans submission, as imagined by modern “Reformed” commentators. Let’s look at a summary of this interpretation: 

First, the modern dominant interpretation is that the passage is a criticism and an antidote to feminism in the church. Paul commands the women in the church to cover their heads when they pray or prophecy, because a head covering is a symbol of authority over them. 

Second, such interpretation is not supported by the grammatical reading of the text. There is no mention of “authority over” women, and grammatical structures show that Paul was speaking to the men in the church, not to the women. 

Third, contextual Biblical criticism of the text shows that such interpretation is inconsistent with the context of the larger passage, and is even inconsistent with other places in the Bible. 

Fourth, in the Greco-Roman society, a veil was not a symbol of “authority over,” but of “authority on,” that is, authority residing and belonging to the one wearing the veil. Women of lower rank were forbidden from covering their heads. 

Fifth, men in the church in Corinth wanted to continue these practices of cultural domination over these weakest members of the society, banning them from covering their heads in the church, which would signify that they now have power and authority. 

Sixth, Paul comes to the defense of these women and tells the men in the church that such laws and customs degrade women so badly that they are equivalent to shaving their heads. Therefore, Paul says, women are to pray with their heads covered, because of the angels, that is, to judicially declare their authority in Christ, in the Kingdom of God. 

And, seventh, Paul tells the men who want to be contentious: the churches in Israel (“of God”) have no such custom. There, the women are free and have authority. 

The customs of our own society today are quite different from those of the Roman society, of course. The veil is no longer a symbol of power and authority; it is rather a symbol of submission. But Paul didn’t speak in this passage to impose on the women a symbol of submission in the church – if he had such a thing in mind, he would be insisting that all women should go uncovered in the church. Paul’s intent was to free the women to declare to the world and to the angels their newfound authority in Christ. The ethical/judicial meaning of Paul’s words was, “Give those women the freedom to exercise their authority in the way they believe is best for them. Don’t impose your pagan rules of power in the church. That power-based world is dead, it is over, and it will soon disappear. We have a world where all those who inherit salvation have authority, and must be let free under God.” 

The conclusion, therefore, is, that those theologians today who use these verses to impose a rule on the women to wear a head covering as a symbol of their submission, actually go straight against the teaching of Paul. While the specific physical symbol is the same, the head covering, the cultural interpretations between Paul’s time and our own time are diametrically opposite to each other. And therefore, arguing for preserving the same symbol is arguing against Paul’s meaning of the text. Or, to put it bluntly, if our theology today insists on forcing women to exhibit submission in the church, then such theology is certainly not Biblical, and not Pauline. It is a false theology, and should be eradicated from our churches. 

The book I will recommend this week is the one I mentioned above: Paul and Gender, by Cynthia Long Westfall. I am not fully familiar with the author, and I have the suspicion that I won’t probably agree with all of her theological positions. But in this book. I can say, she presents herself as faithful to a conservative interpretation of the Bible, free of higher criticism or other liberal tricks, taking the Bible as the inerrant Word of God which is the foundation for all knowledge, reasoning, and wisdom. 

In your praying and giving this new year, 2018, consider Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a Reformed, Reconstructionist, Theonomic mission to Eastern Europe, devoted to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe. The books you help us translate, edit, and publish, will have a tremendous impact on the culture, for the growth of the Kingdom of God. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. God bless you all.

Welcome to Episode 64 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes I will try to cover a topic about which I have received multiple questions given some of the previous episodes of Axe to the Root, and certain teaching I have done on the nature of Biblical government and justice: namely, the issue of the executive state, as opposed to the judiciary state.

For those listeners who are not familiar in detail with those teachings, I want to give a short summary of them:

To get to the point, the civil government the Bible prescribes is strictly judiciary, that is, it is entirely devoted to issues of justice and nothing else. In the Bible, civil government is only the courts, which means, it is largely passive and inactive, and is only triggered to action where there is a dispute between private parties (which cannot, for one reason or another, be resolved through private arbitrage) or where there is a crime and the victim of the crime or his representatives cry out for justice. Thus, in the Law of God, the only function of magistrates is to be judges, nothing else. The so famous passage in Romans 13, which modern statist churchmen use to justify any obedience to the state and any action of state bureaucrats, also supports this limited view of government: it specifically says that civil rulers are to have authority (fear, in the Biblical term) only over evildoers, not over those who do good – thus, Romans 13 doesn’t describe our modern governments. (Our modern governments are rather described in Revelation 13, not Romans 13.) Lawful government servants, therefore, are only those who serve the courts in their functions, nothing more (as were the sheriffs in colonial America and the early American republic). All the other functions of safety, protection, and maintaining order outside disputes and crimes are left to individuals and the community, not to specialized government thugs. The Law also charges the government with the responsibility or waging war, but under the Law, wars are not part of executive policies, they are part of the judiciary, that is, restoring justice and punishing foreign criminals in the same way domestic criminals are judged. That’s why in Israel, it was judges who declared war and led the troops into battle. And when Israel became a monarchy, the kings were supposed to declare war only in their capacity as judges ­­– that is, to restore justice, not to enlarge their dominions or their treasury. Such view of the government as strictly judiciary is the only view that truly maintains a limited government; any other view will by necessity lead to an expanding government, until the state controls every aspect of life.

We have today in America and in the Western world a different concept and practice of government: the concept of the executive state. Under that concept, the state is a corporation with its own vision, ambitions, goals, objectives for the society and its future, and of course, its own policy and its own business. Unlike private corporations, however, the state has no customers or clients (or, rather, has ‘clients,’ but in the old Roman sense, as in legally dependent subjects), because it doesn’t sell any real commodities or services; it has only subjects. Its only commodity or service is raw power – power which, under the Law of God, is supposed to stay dormant until there is a need for it, and then only awaken for the specific case it is needed, and then go to its dormant state again. In the Bible, power is given to not be used except as a last resort. But in the political religion of the modern state (and in the political religion of many modern Christian groups), unused power is wasted power; it must be used to achieve purposes other than justice in order to justify its existence. Thus, we have the state as a corporation with its own goals and purposes, we have the commodity it produces – power, and we have its subjects who are the only available source of resources for the purposes of the state; the logical conclusion can be only one, namely, that the state must use its power to force its subjects to work for or contribute their resources for the goals and the purposes of the state. This is what the executive state is. It has, by default, to control and regulate every single activity its subjects are engaged in, to make sure that every single activity in the society serves the purposes of the state. The modern state, therefore, is described not in Romans 13 but in Revelation 13: “And he causes all, the small and the great, and the rich and the poor, and the free men and the slaves, to be given a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, and he provides that no one will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, eitherthe name of the beast or the number of his name” (vv. 16-17). No matter what your eschatological interpretation of Revelation 13 is, this passage clearly describes the nature of the beastly state, and looking at out world today, we can clearly see that every single state in the world today is a beast, including the United States.

For this reason my argument has been that a major part of the Christian resistance and the Christian view of righteous civil government is that the executive state must go. Executive authority in the Bible – that is, the authority to manage resources, establish and achieve objectives for the future, and set up policies and purposes for those resources – is given to the families and the individuals, not to the state. There is no power in the Bible given to the state to declare illegal or regulate or permit or ban any activity of individuals that the Bible has not declared a crime – from consuming substances, through selling and buying, through starting companies, hiring workers and being hired as a worker, through decisions for saving or spending, through crossing national borders in search of better life, through decisions of voluntary co-operation with other people on any kind of economic or non-economic projects, etc., etc., etc. There is no power given to the government in the Bible to control non-criminal individuals under the pretext of ‘safety.’ There is no power given to the government to create special classes of uniformed thugs granted executive privilege to steal other people’s life, liberty, or property for the purpose of ‘maintaining order.’ Order, safety, prosperity, investments, employment, immigration, education, the future, etc., are prerogatives of the community of free individuals. The only authority the Bible allows the civil government is the area of justice. Nothing else. Thus, police, standing armies, government bureaucracies, immigration restrictions, regulatory agencies, educational agencies, taxing agencies (including school districts), game wardens, are all immoral and unlawful, as far as the Bible is concerned; they are clearly part of the realm of the Beast of Revelation 13, not part of the godly civil government in Romans 13, because they are given power not just over criminals but over non-criminal members of the society as well.

No need to dig deeper here, y’all can find those lectures I have done, at the Freedom Conference earlier this year, and previous episodes of Axe to the Root. My goal today is not talk about the evil of the executive state and the Biblical view of the civil government as a limited judiciary. I want to cover a question that I have been asked many times, especially when I talk about the evil of the standing army of police, which is nothing more than an enforcer for the executive state, and specifically a revenue collector – or you can call it a racketeer or a bagman – for the executive state. The question is: What do we tell those people who work for the police but are not in their personal hearts and conduct, or in their conscience even, corrupt? Police is an evil, anti-Biblical institution, that much can be derived from the Bible, given that there is no mandate in the Law of God for an institution of special executive privilege charged with controlling the general population for the purposes of the elite. Contrary to what most people believe, cops do not spend most of their time fighting crime – only less than 10% of the work of the cops is devoted to that; the rest of their work is revenue collection in one form or another. As one author noted, “if two people start fighting with knives, cops will probably never show up to stop the fight, but dare drive down the road without a registration plate or sell burritos on the street without a license, you bet within less than an hour you will be besieged by several police cars and dozens of cops, threatening you with all kinds of consequences and writing you tickets for hundreds of dollars in fines.” But in that evil institution there are still people who have gotten in because they were misled about the nature of that institution; some of them professing Christians, and some of them still believing that the institution is OK, it just needs to be reformed or even redeemed. What do we tell these people to do? And cops are not the only ones. We have government school workers and teachers who are good people caught in the middle of decisions made out of ignorance, we have good people working for regulatory or taxing agencies, we even have good people working for corrupt politicians or judges, or public attorneys, and should we mention the standing army of the military, something that both the Law of God and our American historical tradition clearly forbid – and we have hundreds of thousands of Christian men and women misled by all the militarist propaganda so cherished by the conservative part of the socialist population of the US – what do we do we tell all these people once we open our eyes and their eyes to the massive idolatry of the executive state we have in out midst, to the political machine of the Beast in Revelation 13? Do we tell them to quit? Do we tell them that it’s OK to stay where they are and just obey orders? How can we teach the Romans 13 view of government – a limited judiciary – and yet approach the issue of Christians working for the current Revelation 13 pagan state in all its different manifestations?

I call this the problem of Christians in Caesar’s household, from the phrase used in Philippians 4:22: “All the saints greet you, especially those of Caesar’s household.” Paul writes this letter from Rome, and he uses the Greek word oikia, meaning not immediate family but ‘household’ in the economic sense of the word, including everyone who is in one way or another dependent on the personal household or business ventures of the ruling emperor. This included the immediate family of the emperor, but also his slaves and servants, his ‘freemen’ (that is, freed slaves), and his clients. Now, clients in Rome meant not the same word it means today; to get a better idea of the meaning of that word, search for ‘patron-client relationship’ in ancient Rome. In general, the phrase ‘Caesar’s household’ meant everyone who in one way or another was economically and judicially dependent on the emperor’s family. The question now is, however, why am I using this phrase in relation to modern executive government agencies, if there isn’t today any Caesar, nor is there any ruling family?

Because the underlying ideology and the principle of existence and operation of the modern executive state is the same as that of the pagan states in ancient times and in the antiquity. The ancient monarchies пїЅ and not only the ancient, but most monarchies in history – as should be well known to any student of history, ruled their domains in a way a homeowner rules his house. Fustel de Coulanges, in his amazingly good study of the Classical Civilization, The Ancient City, points to the fact that the Greek polis as a political entity, and later the Roman Empire, emerged not as a new form of government but only as an extension, or rather, an imitation of the ancient family household. Just as the father in the family ruled over his children and his slaves, the monarch ruled over his subjects. But since every political entity needs not only a ruler, but also a system of bureaucracy to control and manage the resources at the disposal of the state, the ancient monarchs were in need of loyal bureaucrats to do the control and the management. There is only one way to have loyal bureaucrats, and that is, to make them all economically dependent on the ruler, just as servants in the household. Under the Republic, government positions were voted to members of the patrician class. The voting process eventually became corrupt, there is no doubt about it, but it was still a process that at least assumed some manner of separation between private business and public duties, and it at least placed some restrictions and threatened prosecution for abuse of power. (Julius Caesar started the civil war because he was asked to give up his military command and appear in Rome for prosecution.) Once the Empire was practically proclaimed in 45 BC with the proclamation of Caesar for dictator for life, he immediately started replacing the elected patricians in positions of government with appointed bureaucrats – and all of them members of his own household, including his freed slaves. The Empire – which was in its very essence an executive state – continued replacing elected statesmen with household servants, and by the time of Constantine, it was all a gigantic bureaucracy, with no true public servants anymore. When Paul was writing his letter, the process was under way, and even at that early time (he was writing under the reign of Nero), much of the government of the empire was given over to low-level members of the household of the Caesars. When Paul was speaking of ‘those of Caesar’s household,’ he was speaking of what today would be described as ‘public servants’: bureaucrats, low-level administrators, police, regulatory and taxing agencies, etc. These were people who owed their economic survival to their loyalty to the person in power. They had no other means to make a living or prosper; they relied on the power of their master to rob the rest of the population of their hard-earned money, and then distribute part of it among his own household. And that is exactly the way the executive state operates today. It has its own household, its own army of people who are economically dependent on it; a bureaucracy which survives and thrives on the power of the executive state to rob the working population of a portion of their income, gainings, or profit, and the power to distribute part of it among its own house servants. Caesar doesn’t exist today, but the principle of making the state into a giant household ruling over the families of the land is still here with us.

Now, much can be said about why today, after 2,000 years of Christianity, we still have such a pagan state ruling over us, instead of the Biblical model of civil government of a strictly judiciary state. The blame, of course, is on the church and its leaders, but analyzing their guilt is not the focus of this episode. The question today is this: what do we say to these members of the household of the modern Caesar? Do we tell them to quit, or stay where they are?

Over the last several years, while speaking on the concept of the Biblical judiciary state and the evil of the modern executive state, I have been confronted with the logical challenge: If we know that the modern executive state is evil, that it is only a modern version of the ancient pagan states, we should be telling those Christians – and not only Christians – who serve it and are part of its household to quit their jobs. Face it, Bo, there can be no such thing as good cops or good tax collectors or good public school teachers or public government employees. Or good public military servicemen, for that matter, given that the Bible doesn’t allow standing armies, and besides, the US military is involved in so many unrighteous and unjust wars around the globe. Why would we tell those people – especially if they are Christians – to stay where they are, instead of telling them to leave and not serve the Beast? Seeing that I never made that call, some of my friends who insist that a Christian must be consistent and not work for any executive government agencies were rather exasperated and baffled by my position: How is it that you, who of all people are the most vehement critic of the executive state, don’t see it logical and necessary to call for an exodus out of it? In fact, I have also said several times that it may be expedient for Christians who are in these agencies to stay there for as long as they can. Why is that?

Of course, the most obvious – although, not the strongest – reason is the impracticality of such an advice. Or, rather, the impossibility of consistently applying it across the board. OK, we can apply it somewhat in a mixed economy where, while the government controls a certain share of the market and the economy, other parts are left to some form of private initiative. Like the US. Anyone can decide to leave his government job and go into the private business; and in fact, in most cases, his economic position will improve by doing that. So it’s really not that much of a sacrifice; well, perhaps, the only thing that one sacrifices when leaving their government job is the relative security of the job. But what do we do with Christians in totalitarian states where everything, the whole economy and the market, are not simply controlled but owned by the state and used for its purposes? In Eastern Europe before 1989, there simply wasn’t any market nor economy nor entrepreneurship outside the state. Any job a person could take had to be working for the state in one form or another, and therefore producing value for the state. (Now, how much of value that was is a different issue.) Whatever one wanted to be or was born to be – an engineer, an agricultural worker, a teacher, an accountant – he had to work for the state. The only alternative was to completely abandon the society and find a remote place where one could survive without the society. That’s what the Russian Lykov family did in 1936: Old believers being persecuted by the Communist authorities, they retreated with their two younger kids deep into the Siberian taiga and settled in a place never before visited by any human being, including the local tribes. Two more children were born while they lived in isolation, and the family survived year after year with great difficulties, until they were discovered by geologists 42 years later. But is this the way for a Christian family, and specifically for a Reformed family living under a totalitarian regime? Can we consistently demand that Christians fulfill the Great Commission expand the Kingdom of God in any circumstances, and yet, demand of them life choices that, in certain institutional settings, will make them powerless, or even doom them to starvation? Having lived under Communism, and knowing what it is, I can’t consistently tell anyone that they need to leave their job for the government and try to find another means of survival. If I can’t do it to a Cuban or North Korean or Venezuelan Christian, I can’t do it to an American Christian.

But this is a practical consideration, and, admittedly, it can be a weak argument. Consistency perhaps can sometimes be trumped by extraordinary circumstances. Perhaps. The ultimate strong argument, however, would be a Biblical command or example. Does the Bible mention believers who are in service of a pagan, executive state, and does the Bible give specific commands to those believers?

It turns out that it does, and the passage where it does it is pretty clear, and applies quite well to our modern situation. That passage is Luke 3:12-14, where tax collectors and soldiers were asking John the Baptist what they should do now, as repentant and baptized people:

[QUOTE]And some tax collectors also came to be baptized, and they said to him, “Teacher, what shall we do?” And he said to them, “Collect no more than what you have been ordered to.” Some soldiers were questioning him, saying, “And what about us, what shall we do?” And he said to them, “Do not take money from anyone by force, or accuse anyone falsely, and be content with your wages.”[END OF QUOTE]

Tax collectors and soldiers. I don’t know how much worse it can go. The racketeers of the Empire; those who sucked the blood of the Empire’s population in order to feed the Beast. It was these two categories – the tax collectors and the soldiers – who made sure that no one who didn’t have the sign of the Beast (a permit, a certificate of paid taxes) could buy or sell. And these guys – these guys – came to be baptized! Imagine the nerve! And, even worse, John the Baptist didn’t reject them, he actually baptized them, and then, when they asked him what to do, he failed to tell them, ‘quit your jobs.’ Amazingly enough, even though it is only logical for him to tell them to quit their jobs in service of the Beast, he not only didn’t do it, he gave them ethical rules for how to do their job. It’s not like the Roman Empire was a totalitarian state where everything was owned by the state and therefore every job was working for the state. People were allowed to be free workers, they were allowed to have their own business. Peter was a fisherman, Paul made tents, etc. No one had to work for the government. Then why didn’t John tell these people to quit their jobs?

It is also interesting to see what ethical instructions he gave them. To the tax collectors, he said, “Collect no more than you are ordered to.” Now, before some statists decide to use this as a ‘proof’ that the Bible justifies any taxes and any rate of taxation, it doesn’t. These were instructions to people in a lower position, whose only power was to decide how much they will collect. They were not the ones who ordered what taxes must be collected. They were the ones fulfilling the orders. That is, if an order was given that a family must pay a specific sum, the tax collector’s job was to count the families in his district and take the money from them. Using the power of the state, that is, the soldiers, if necessary. Now, at the time, tax collectors apparently had the same drive as tax collectors today: they were always tempted to use their power to extort more from the defenseless population than what was ordered – of course, with the purpose of lining up their own pockets. Except that at that time, the practice was rather illegal, at least on the books. But since there was no regulatory organ to control tax collectors, they were pretty left alone to extort as much as they could, and pocket the difference. In today’s US, tax collectors are encouraged to collect more, and receive bonuses for it.

John’s instructions to these tax collectors are that they shouldn’t collect more than they are ordered to. That is, they are not supposed to enrich themselves while they carry out the orders of their sovereign, the pagan state. But these are people who just got baptized and are believers! How can we interpret John’s words? What is the worldview and what is the

; that is, they were a standing army charged with the task of suppressing the population in favor of the ruling elite in Rome. Naturally, as any standing army of the interior, they were also charged with the task of assisting the tax collectors in their work. No different than modern police: modern cops spend more than 90% of their time collecting revenue, and only 5% fighting crime. Just like the modern cops, the cops of the time were subject to the same temptations and committed the same sins and crimes. Because of this, John warned them against those sins and crimes: Do not take money from anyone by force (asset forfeiture, fines, etc), do not accuse anyone falsely (planting evidence, cops posing as instigators of crime, lying in court, etc.), and be content with your wages (corruption, bribery, using their power to run criminal enterprises, etc.) Obviously, the cops at the time were exactly like the cops of our time. And yet, all John told them was to refrain from abuse of power, leading to these specific sinful and criminal practices, but he never told them to quit their jobs. Why?

This clear example has been what makes me reluctant to declare that since police and other government executive institutions are, by the nature of their function, unlawful Biblically, then the Christians who work in them must quit their jobs. If John didn’t tell the tax collectors and the soldiers of his time to quit, I have no Biblical mandate to tell modern policemen, government school teachers, IRS agents, agents of regulatory agencies, etc., to quit their jobs. That much must be clear.

Now, none of this means that the institutions they work for are lawful or necessary, from a Biblical perspective. The Roman executive state was the Beast, and the modern state is the Beast, and their executive institutions are unlawful and must be abolished, all of them, as soon as possible, preferably yesterday. For a Christian to remain working in them is lawful, Biblically, provided the individual is aware of the institutional sin prevalent in that institution, and provided he takes measures to not participate in it. But why should a Christian remain in such an institution?

The only possible answer is: because there, he fulfills an important purpose in the Kingdom of God in history. But what is that purpose? It is certainly not to rationale for his words within that worldview?

He said the same to the soldiers. Soldiers, of course, in the Roman Empire, were not just a military. They also fulfilled the role of the modern police perpetuate the institution; perpetuating a pagan institution can never be the purpose of a Christian. But what is it, and where in the Bible can we find such an answer?

The answer is found in the person and ministry of Joseph. Joseph, who was raised to the position of the highest ruler in the Kingdom of Egypt after the Pharaoh, and since that kingdom at the time was the most powerful kingdom in the world, he became the most powerful man alive. He achieved all this while serving a pagan empire. In his time, it was just as pagan as it was centuries later, when the Israelites were enslaved under it. It openly served false gods. It openly made sorcery and occultism its government policy. It was, for all practical purposes, a pagan state, if there has ever been one. And yet, Joseph served that state, and Joseph’s service to that pagan state is considered one of the highest examples of service to God in the Bible.

Now, before we jump to incorrect conclusions, let me explain something. Some modern Reformed authors have taken the example of Joseph to postulate some legitimacy to the modern socialist state – see, if Joseph was the most powerful man of a socialist state, therefore there is nothing wrong with statism and socialism in our modern days. This interpretation misses the fact that unlike the modern socialist state, Joseph did not use his power to force a nationalization of Egypt’s economy. All Joseph used was his prophetic skill and his economic genius. The people of Egypt were not forced to surrender their property; nor was the military or police apparatus of Egypt used to confiscate private property. They voluntarily surrendered all they had (Genesis 47). During the seven years of abundance, when the land had a surplus of food, Joseph gathered one fifth of the food – presumably, the surplus of those years. The people of Egypt each had the opportunity also to store food for himself and his family, learning from Joseph’s example, but none of them did. When the years of starvation came, they were forced to sell everything they had to Joseph in order to get food from him. Joseph’s power – and the power of his master, the Pharaoh, grew not through superior force but through superior economic reason. Thus, Joseph has nothing to do with the modern socialist states.

And yet, he served a pagan state. What was the purpose for the Kingdom of God of that service?

It was bringing temporary redemption to a place of evil, in history.

The Egyptian state was a pagan state. It was also the most powerful state at the time, and its power was fueled by its control of the most fertile land at the time, the valley and the delta of the Nile. The promised land was situated very close to that pagan state. The pagan state itself was not always a reliable neighbor; remember that Sarah was taken away from Abraham by the king of Egypt (Gen. 12). Later, when a Pharaoh came to the throne who remembered not Joseph, the state enslaved whole populations. All this happened in times of relative safety and prosperity and peace. Imagine what would have happened during the seven years of famine, if such a pagan state was faced with the problem of population restless because of famine, and pressure from other nations for the same reason? The result would have been devastating. In places like China or India, a simple change of dynasties or an internecine strife have led to millions slaughtered. Egypt wouldn’t have avoided a similar fate if it had entered the famine period without proper economic preparations. Joseph, in this case, was serving not the pagan state but God’s Kingdom through the medium of the pagan state. He was bringing temporary redemption in a place of evil. It was temporary: God never designed to take over Egypt through Joseph. He only designed to bring temporary redemption to Egypt, until His people were safe. Nothing more. No service to the pagan state. No legitimacy to socialism. No legitimacy to the executive state and its brutal institutions. The only purpose was bringing temporary redemption to a place that without that redemption would have turned into hell on earth.

The same was situation with Naaman, the Syrian general serving under king Ben-Hadad of Syria. He became a believer after being baptized in a way by the prophet Elisha (2 Kings 5:15). Elisha, however, did not tell him to leave his position of the highest general of a pagan king. In fact, Naaman even told Elisha that he would regularly enter the temple of Rimmon, a Syrian deity, because of his obligations to his king, but that his bowing before the statue of Rimmon won’t be because of worship to Rimmon. Elisha did not see a problem with this arrangement and even sent him out with a ‘lech l’shalom,’ a greeting reserved only for those in the covenant. Why was this? While the answer is not explicitly given, we see that during the reign of Ben-Hadad, Syria, which at the time was the mightiest kingdom in the region, was friendly to Israel, and Ben-Hadad honored Hebrew prophets as ‘men of God’ (see 2 Kings 8). Apparently, the influence of Naaman the believer was felt in the Syrian court; God had a temporary mercy for Israel, before He allowed all hell to break loose. All hell indeed broke loose and we see the true nature of Syrian paganism when Hazael, a man who was anointed by Elijah (1 Kings 19:15) and prophesied about by Elisha (2 Kings 8) assassinated Ben-Hadad and became a king of Syria. Again, the influence of a believer in a pagan government was obvious: a temporary respite from the full manifestation of hell on earth. And certainly not an endorsement of pagan governments and pagan political and judicial practices.

There are other examples in the Bible and in church history as well, but these two should suffice for our purposes here. What is important for us to understand is this: God doesn’t command all the servants of pagan governments to leave their posts upon becoming Christians. He doesn’t discourage Christians from joining pagan governments as servants or even rulers. Yes, even where they join an institution that is, in its purpose and intent, an evil institution. The only caveat for a Christian joining such institution is that he must join it with the clear intention and vision to serve as a temporary redemption in a place or institution ultimately destined to be abolished, because it is nothing less than hell on earth. He must be there as Jesus who preached to the spirits in prison (1 Pet. 3:19). Or, even better, following 1 Tim. 4:10, we know that Christ is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe. Now, obviously, there is some sort of salvation to those who don’t believe, although it is not the special one we get. This general salvation, or temporary redemption, is what such a servant of God is supposed to do. Not to perpetuate a pagan government; but to undermine a pagan government in its purposes and agenda, and deter the full unleashing of its potential of wickedness and injustice.

Cops and tax collectors and other government servants today are no different than what they were in the Roman Empire. They use their position to steal, rob, and destroy. Whole divisions within the police departments are specialized in false witnessing – those where cops are trained to pose as drug dealers who push drugs to people with the purpose of arresting them after that. If, of course, they just don’t plant ‘evidence’ to justify arrests. Police, contrary to the claims, doesn’t fight crime. More than 90% of the work of modern police is revenue collection for the local governments. Which is not different from collecting more money than they are told to. More than 40-50% of the budgets of many local governments and police departments and Sheriff’s offices come from fines and tickets and from the modern form of highway robbery called ‘asset forfeiture.’ Let this sink. May be we think that we as voters vote on how much our taxes should be, but in reality, unelected bureaucrats – or worse, unelected bureaucrats with weapons and badges ­­­– really decide how much they are going to extort from us, and it is more than double than what we vote for. This is exactly the modern form of what Zachaeus did before he repented, using government force to extort people for money, and this is exactly what John the Baptist warned the tax collectors and the soldiers again: ‘Do not force anyone,’ and ‘Do not take more than what ordered.’ (Ordered today would mean what was voted, given that the official sovereign are the voters.) We have seen from so many examples that cops are not even above murder of innocent people for no reason whatsoever – and the courts support them. For all practical purposes, our modern government is just as barbaric and cruel and pagan as any government in the antiquity.

What would be the reason for a Christian, then, to stay in such institutions, or to even join such institutions?

What the Biblical reason is: To bring temporary redemption to an institution which will eventually be abolished, but in the meantime, if not restrained, may create hell on earth. The purpose for Christians in Caesar’s household must be to sabotage Caesar’s household in its pagan nature and goals; to use their power to refuse to implement the wicked aspects of its policy. In times of disaster, Christians in Caesar’s household must be trained and taught to act like Joseph: Taking over to prevent pagans in power from acting as pagans, and bringing God’s order to situations that otherwise would disintegrate into chaos.

Christian tax collectors should use their position to sabotage the collection of taxes as much as they can. Collecting more than 10% in taxes is idolatry and an affront to God, so using one’s position to achieve any decrease in the tax burden on individuals and companies is a worthy goal for a Christian in any tax agency. Additional charges must be sabotaged, court action against taxpayers must be sabotaged; and in dire times when businesses and individuals suffer from both economic downturns and government oppression, tax collectors must fulfill their oath to God by deliberately refusing to implement policies that place even more burden on affected families and businesses. Every single rule in the book must be used to justify more money left in the hands and bank accounts of the taxpayers; and when a tax collector goes to court, he must deliberately come unprepared so that the case against the taxpayer is dismissed.

The advice to police should be similar: sabotage the unjust and wicked aspects of the work of police. First and foremost, refuse to be a revenue collector for the government. Revenue collection is not mentioned in any of the oath police officers take; thus, there is no violation of oath if a cop refuses, either overtly or covertly, to be a revenue collector. Moreover, the practice of revenue or tickets quotas is illegal, so no police officer is under any pressure or obligation to write tickets or collect fines. The principle of a Christian police officer must be this: ‘If the bureaucrats want to collect money, they are free to leave their offices and go collect it. I am not doing it for them.’ It should also go without saying that a police officer must deliberately refuse to get involved in all the immorality and false witnessing cops are taught to do: planting ‘evidence,’ murder, using force, even detaining individuals who have not committed any crime. The only Biblically legitimate function of a police officer is being an agent of the courts; that is, serving court warrants and executing court orders. Nothing else. Of course, in case a cop finds himself in a situation where crime is being committed – and such situations are notoriously rare – he is obligated to act to stop the criminal, but then again, this is a not specific police job, it is the duty and privilege of any individual. In court, a police officer must refuse to testify against individuals who have not committed a crime according to the Law of God, even if the laws of men say they have committed a crime. In everything police does these days, a Christian police officer should sabotage the work of his own agency by remaining faithful to the Biblical Law, and also, remain a servant of the only institution that is Biblically legitimate, namely, the courts.

The same applies to government school teachers, bureaucrats in regulatory agencies, employees of federal standing armies like the military, the BLM, the immigration agencies, etc. all these executive agencies were created to enforce the will of the pagan state, and thus create hell on earth. A Christian working for them must strive to bring temporary redemption to those places by (1) sabotaging the anti-Biblical aspects of their work, and (2) bringing God’s order to situations which otherwise would deteriorate into chaos. Bringing God’s order, and sabotaging Satan’s disorder, is the covenantal purpose of work of a Christian in Caesar’s household.

And if a Christian government employee can’t do these things, or feels he is not strong enough to deal with the opposition, he should leave. Living and working where the throne of Satan is not a job for everyone. It is a legitimate job in the history before the Final Judgment, but it is not an easy job. And certainly not for everyone.

The book I will recommend this week is Joseph Goulden’s The Best Years, 1945-1950. The book covers the problem of the returning WWII veterans and their proneness to violence. But it also shows the conflict between the returning GIs and the boss-ruled Democrat southern states. Including the Battle of Athens, TN in 1946. Pay attention to the role of police in these events. You will find out that police has never been on the side of justice; it has always been on the side of corrupt governments. If it wasn’t for the military superiority of the GIs over the cops, to this day, the Southern states would have remained corrupt and controlled by party bosses like third-world countries. But even today, police continues to serve corrupt party bosses. And since today we don’t have returning GIs in such numbers as after WWII, the only restraining force in our society are those Christians who have served or serve in the police, and know how to sabotage its work and bring morality and order to the wickedness and chaos of the modern state.

And remember, in your prayers and giving, Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization committed to bringing the full and comprehensive Gospel to Eastern Europe; not only saving souls, but also redeeming the society for the Kingdom of God through preaching the Law of God and the Redemption of Jesus Christ to every area of society. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. Your money won’t be wasted. And God bless you all.

Welcome to Episode 63 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will tackle a topic which, for all 2000 years of church history, still remains unresolved: tithing. No, don’t expect me to resolve it in one little episode of one little podcast, if dozens of books by all kinds of theologians of all kinds of denominations, and tens of thousands of sermons by all kinds of preachers of all kinds of denominations have not led to anything close to agreement, nor even to approximate agreement on the issue. I sometimes think that tithing is a bit overrated topic, just like water baptism. If you remember, in the episode where we talked about water baptism, I pointed out that the proportion of our modern theological talk that we have devoted to water baptism doesn’t in any possible way match the proportion the Bible devotes to it: we have at the most half dozen verses in the Bible – a very low share compared to the whole Scripture – dealing with water baptism, while in our modern theological discussions we have thousands of books and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of chapters, lectures, articles, seminary textbook lessons, etc., that deal with the topic of water baptism. I wonder sometimes, where do we find all the material to comment on, if the Bible contains so little on the issue? The same problem I see in our theological treatment of the tithe: there is very little on it in the Bible (although, admittedly, more than about water baptism), and most of it is not prescriptive in any way, or can’t serve to give us any practical instructions or commands as to what we should do about it in the modern church.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that the tithe is not important – just like I am not saying that the sacraments are not important. But importance has its degrees, and it is perfectly possible for the importance of some things to be overestimated, for different reasons. For one, it may be overestimated because of false ideology based on a fallacious worldview. To think of an example, it would be Paul’s discussion of the virtues of celibacy in 1 Cor. 7:32-35. Paul’s words are important, but a false ideology like that of the Roman church will lead us to ascribe too much “spirituality” to a special class of single people. Or importance may be overemphasized because it is in the personal interest of a special class of people to establish their power over other people; and I am sure you can easily figure what class of people may be served by overemphasizing the sacraments and the tithe. Especially the tithe.

Thus, as important as the tithe is, it is not awfully commonly covered in the Bible – at least not as much as other things, like righteousness and justice, which most of the time go unmentioned from the church’s pulpits in America. But if you have listened to most episodes of Axe to the Root, by now you know why the vast majority of pulpits seldom mention justice and righteousness, the foundations of God’s throne. This is not our topic now, however. This week, we want to look into a connection seldom made by most churches today, even when they claim to preach “Biblically” on the tithe. The topic is: What is the responsibility of the tither as to where his tithe goes?

“Responsibility” and “accountability” have become fashionable words in the churchian landscape of the last several decades. Now, when I say “fashionable,” I don’t mean that accountability is not a good thing. In fact, accountability – in terms of giving an account to other Christians about one’s beliefs, words, and actions – is part of the very nature of the covenant, and is an integral part of covenantal thinking. Remember, when we talked, in the first episode of Axe to the Root, about the nature of Biblical spirituality, and about the Biblical definition of a spiritual man, we saw that the Bible has only one definition for a spiritual man: one who judges everything. Biblical spirituality, therefore, requires that all the actions of all the people pass careful scrutiny as to whether they are in agreement with the ethics and the worldview of the Bible. The spiritual man must judge everything, and his actions must be subject to judgment; or, as Hebrews 5:14 indicates, a mature person is one who has trained his senses to discern between good and evil in everything. And he must judge himself; especially himself, as Matt. 7:3-5 and Luke 6:41-42 command. Therefore, in a world of Biblical spirituality, you will have to judge, if you are spiritual, and, conversely, you will have to be judged, because as spiritual as you are, you aren’t perfectly so, and therefore you are not above judgment by other people. In this mutual judgment between covenant people who are all spiritual, and yet who are all still imperfect in their spirituality, comes true accountability. We are judged by others in terms of good and evil in all we believe speak, and do, and we judge others in terms of good and evil in all they believe, speak, and do. This mutual judgment is what restrains us from going rogue on God and His covenant. This mutual judgment is what keeps us accountable to God.

Unfortunately, however, this is not what modern pastors and preachers have in mind when they speak about accountability. And I am speaking here not just of any pastors and preachers, but of evangelical and Reformed pastors and preachers – or what passes for “evangelical” or “Reformed.” Ironically, the Reformation started with Luther’s attack against Rome’s ecclesiology; an ecclesiology that placed all the power in the church in the hands of a self-appointed institutional elite, which institutional elite insisted that it was by the right of its institutional power free of any accountability to the mass of ordinary believers and members of the universal church. Today, we like to look back to the Reformation as a gigantic battle of theological concepts, but the reality is, for the first 7 years after Luther posted his Theses on the door of that church in Wittenberg, the arguments used against the German Reformer were only ecclesiological arguments: “By what authority are you saying all these things?” “Who are your elders?” “What church are you a member of?” Etc. The theological debates didn’t start until 1524, when Erasmus published his Diatribe on the Freedom of the Will, to which Luther replied the next year in his The Bondage of the Will. The resistance against the Reformation was initially not against Luther’s theology – in fact, quite a few Roman theologians were willing to acknowledge the basic points of his theology as valid. The argument was against his claim that the Pope and his cardinals and archbishops should be subject to the same rules for accountability and judgment as the ordinary believers. That’s why the real controversy of the Reformation was not the doctrine of Scripture, nor the doctrine of predestination vs. free will, nor even the doctrine of salvation by works or by faith, but Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, and, even more than that, what followed from it: the doctrine of the right and duty of private judgment. Yes, the same doctrine of the right and duty of private judgment which today is forgotten and never even mentioned in any Reformed or evangelical church throughout the United States. The doctrine that gave the spark of the Reformation has ZERO sermons devoted to it on SermonAudio today, and the vast majority of “Reformed” or “evangelical” church-goers have never even heard of it, and certainly not from their pastors or elders or seminary professors. For all practical purposes, what passes for “Protestant” or “evangelical” today has returned to Roman Catholicism.

Under this papist ecclesiology restored in the churches that claim to be “Protestant” or “evangelical,” accountability is only applied to ordinary members but not to church leadership. Obviously, if ordinary members are not priests (if their priesthood is not reaffirmed in the church’s theology) and if their right and duty of private judgment is not established and affirmed (because it is forgotten and not preached about at all), there is no theological principle that can keep the elders or the session accountable for anything they do. Except, of course, to themselves, which is no different than the practice of modern police department to “investigate themselves” and, of course, clear themselves of any wrongdoing, even when cops commit obvious crimes like murder of robbery. In my article, “Modern Presbyterianism and the Destruction of the Principle of Plurality of Elders,” I have shown how the very constitutions of Presbyterian denominations are so written as to prevent any judicial action against church sessions who commit injustice. On the surface, individual elders are liable to be taken to court; but that means nothing once you realize that according to the same denominations’ constitutions, rule in the churches is only joint, never individual. Thus, sessions as bodies make decisions but sessions as bodies are not liable, and you can’t take a session to court. (And if you take individual elders to court, they always have the session’s decision as their justification.) Accountability is only for the ordinary believers who are not protected by the legal power of their status as members of the session; for them, their “membership” only makes them vulnerable to all kids of injustices from the leadership. But for the leadership, accountability is zero. Thus, when you hear the word “accountability” coming out of the mouth of a modern “Reformed” or “evangelical” pastor or preacher, keep in mind, it doesn’t mean what you think it means. It only means that he keeps for himself the power to control your life and part of your money, under the pretext of “ministering” to you, while at the same time you are not allowed to ask about or seek accountability from him as to what he does with the power he has and with the money you are expected to contribute to his so-called “ministry.”

Responsibility, R.J. Rushdoony says in his Institutes of Biblical Law, pages 481-484, is not a one-way street. Even when we enter a covenant with God, Who has no obligation to anything in His creation, He still voluntarily assumes certain obligations on His part of the Covenant. It would be even more applicable to relationships between men: there is never a one-way street relationship where only one of the parties is responsible to the other. Responsibility must be a two-way street, otherwise, as Rushdoony shows from Biblical examples, it is not true responsibility but pure theft. In a relationship where only one party bears responsibility and therefore is accountable to the other, the other party is nothing more than a thief, and can’t be any kind of “minister.”

This context and background – of true Biblical responsibility and accountability – is the only legitimate context and background for any discussion on the tithe. Without first laying the foundation of true Biblical relationships of mutual judgment and accountability – including between members of the church and ministers of the church – we can’t really talk about the tithe. Without such background, the tithe becomes nothing more than extortion money; a fee levied on the ordinary believer to acknowledge him as part of the visible church. A refusal to pay the fee makes him officially un-admitted into the church. Again, not that the tithe itself is unlawful or un-Biblical; but the context in which it is paid – one-way responsibility between the ordinary members and the church leadership, and the total lack of accountability for the leadership – makes the tithe nothing more than theft. Unless we acknowledge this ethical/judicial reality of any relationship between church members and church ministers – not just the tithe – we are doomed to create nothing more than the same papist bureaucracy as Rome. And indeed, the vast majority of the so called “local churches” in the US are nothing more than local popedoms. This last week was 500 years of the beginning of the Reformation; and yet, looking at the churchian landscape in America today, one can hardly see anything else but Rome replicated 300,000 times.

Given that ethical/judicial context of two-way responsibility between men and their institutions, then, what is the Biblical way for us to think about the tithe? Keep in mind that while the Bible does speak about the tithe, and while it can be safely concluded from the little it says about it that every believer owes God a tithe, and that means not just given directly to God but to someone else on earth, whether institutions or projects or individual people, there is nothing in the Bible that specifically declares the procedural details of where and how the tithe is supposed to be paid. At least not in the New Testament. There are such specific laws in the Old Testament, but there is also sufficient evidence that these laws are part of the shadows of the Law, and therefore these laws are applicable under the New Covenant under the discretion of general equity at best. Besides, as we will see shortly, even the shadows of the Old Testament admitted of the use of discretion, common sense, and general equity contrary to the specific commandments – and in fact, Jesus approved of such use. To say it simply, there is more to the tithe than just giving it to a group of priests or elders. The group or session of priests or elders have to work hard to deserve it. If they don’t, the obligation of the tither is to re-direct his tithe. In other words, he has an obligation to pay it; but his pastor or elders are not entitled to it by default. Once we understand the Biblical principle that the tithe has to be given only in a setting of two-way responsibility, the theory that the giver is obligated to give, and then it’s on the church ministers what they do with it, is dispelled. The giver must make sure the money he gives goes to the right purposes, otherwise his responsibility is to not give, and to re-direct his money to where it will be used rightly. So, then, what is the principle?

Since the modern defenders of ecclesiocracy defend, in one way or another the principle of one-way responsibility – that is, the church member is obligated to tithe (that’s where the so-called “local church membership” matters the most, not the nonsense of “fellowship,” which is actually lacking in almost all the churches who practice formal “membership”), so, the church member is obligated to tithe but spending the money is left to the discretion of the church leadership – and since these modern defenders of ecclesiocracy point to the Law of God and its commandments to tithe to the levitical system, our best starting point in learning the principle behind tithing is to start from the exceptions to the rule. If there are exceptions to the rule, then it can be only because the principle of tithing is broken somewhere; and if we find out what is broken, we will be able to find the connection between tithing and the ethical/judicial foudnation for the responsibility of the tither.

In his Institutes, page 513, Rushdoony mentions one such exception, and comments shortly on it. Here are his words:

[QUOTE]The tithe is to the Lord. Thus, in the days of Elisha, a man from Baal-Shalisha brought his tithe to Elisha and his school rather than to the priests (2 Kings 4:42). In so doing, he was exercising his right to give to that which served the Lord best, rather to an official but apostate priesthood.[END OF QUOTE]

Notice how Rushdoony pays homage to the fundamental principle of the Reformation, the Right and Duty of Private Judgment, a principle that today is forgotten in every single church and denomination that claims to be “Reformed” or “Protestant.” I think, however, Rushdoony is slightly incorrect here. No not incorrect in the fact that an individual has the right and duty to judge who is eligible to receive his tithe: That much is obvious, if we understand the principle of Biblical responsibility and accountability. Where he is slightly incorrect is that he believes that the principle for giving is “to that which serves the Lord best.” While it does have some merit to it, I think there is more to consider in this situation. At least we know from the Bible, that even under the Old Covenant, the laws for the tithe were such as to be open to breaking when it came to giving; an individual could decide to give elsewhere, not to the priests, and that didn’t have to incur guilt. The bikkurim, the first fruits mentioned in this example, were specifically to be offered as a grain offering and also eaten before the Lord, in a sort of presentation of Israel. Taking them to a prophet somewhere in the wilderness was a violation of the Law. But Elisha didn’t see it as such. He instead used it to make the first example of feeding hundreds of people with just a little food, and some even remained, pre-imaging Jesus’s similar miracles. This connection with Jesus’s miracles is important, and we will return to it shortly. The question still is: what did the man of Baal-Shalisha (which literally means, The Lord of the Three, or The Lord of the Trinity, by the way, and is a city that no one really knows where it is) see in Elisha to find it necessary to break the Law and give him what belonged to the priests and the Temple?

It must have been the same thing as in another example where what by the Law belonged to the priests was given to a non-priest: 1 Samuel 21:4-6, when Ahimelech the priest gave David and his men the consecrated bread which only the priests were allowed to eat of. Another violation of the Law, and yet, God didn’t seem displeased with it; in fact, Jesus affirms that it was right and just to do it, in Matthew 12:4. (See also Luke 6:1-5 and Mark 2:23-28.) Jesus’s words here indicate something, however, which is usually missed in the English translations, which translate it either the consecrated or sacred bread or the shewbread. The phrase Jesus uses, however, is different; it literally means, in Greek, the bread of the presence, in all three gospels. Now, the original Hebrew text of 1 Samuel 24 only uses the phrase “sacred” or “consecrated” bread. Why did Jesus change it to “of the presence”? The phrase “bread of the presence” is used only twice in the Old Testament, once in Exodus 25:30, and then in Exodus 39:36. The bread is usually called kodesh, that is, “consecrated,” and Ahimelech uses that same phrase, but for this specific case, Jesus prefers to call it “of the presence,”, as in its less common use.

He obviously does it to indicate that the shadow parts of the Law can be ignored when a greater issue is at hand. He is speaking of His disciples violating the Sabbath (which was true, they were violating it), and after giving His examples from the Law, He ended with His justification of their actions: “Something greater than the Temple is here.”

Now we are beginning to see the common element: There is a presence there. Jesus preferred to use the less known name of the bread – the bread of the presence – and He ended His lesson with, “There is a greater presence here.” Returning to His other example in Matt. 12, the priests breaking the Sabbath in the Temple and not being guilty. Why? Well, they are in the Temple, and the Temple was not a magic place, it was the presence of God. Obviously, if the Presence was gone, the Temple was nothing, so the only thing that saved the priests was God’s presence.

Now that we have noticed the common element, we can return to the man of Baal-Shalisha and ask, what did the man see in Elisha, after all? Again, he saw the presence of God. The story of him bringing Elisha his first fruits is right in the middle of a long passage (2 Kings, chapter 4-6) describing the everyday miracles Elisha was performing in Israel and outside Israel. Now, modern cessationist theologians to the contrary, miracles are not limited to proving the veracity of a word; they have a much greater function, and that function is to indicate of thepresence of God. All the miracles in the gospels were meant to prove to Israel that the one called Emanuel, that is, God with us, is here. “Are you the One,” asked John the Baptist, “or should we wait for another.” (There’s your long Baptist tradition of distrusting God’s miracles and trusting men’s words.) Jesus’s answer was: “Look at all these miracles. What else do you need to know Whose presence is here?” Such examples can be found everywhere in the Bible, where miracles indicated the presence of God. So the man of Baal-Shalisha knew well: This Elisha dude has miracles happen around him all the time. God’s presence must be with him. I will put first fruits where God’s presence is.

The same principle can be seen in other instances of the tithe, or of any offering whatsoever. Why did Abraham give Melchizedek a tithe? Hebrews 7 explains it: Melchizedek, whose name is both priest and king, was the presence of the very God: “Without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like the Son of God.” Abraham, whose spirit was very sensitive to the presence of God (remember Gen. 18:3), and he could certainly sense when someone has the presence of God with them. This is what made him give a tithe.

Jacob’s pledge to give a tithe was related to the same factor: God’s presence. In Genesis 28:10-22, Jacob has a dream, and he sees God, and God repeats to him the promise of His covenant. Jacob wakes up and his reaction is, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it.” Again, God’s presence is there. He calls the place Bethel, the House of God, even though there was no temple nor any institutional arrangement there; and, by the way, there has never been any in the history of Israel. And then Jacob promises to serve God and – wait for it – to “surely give a tithe” to God. Again, it is God’s presence, and that in a place where there is only a stone, and there has never been anything else, no church, no temple, not even a synagogue.

And there are many other examples in the Bible, where people felt obligated to give money where they saw the presence of God: when the Israelites contributed to the Tabernacle, later to the Temple, when Naaman wanted to donate a fortune to Elisha, when the Christians in Jerusalem sold their property and took the money to the apostles, etc., etc., etc. To this we need to add the special tithe of the third year which was not even related to the Temple system in any possible way (Deut. 14:28-29; 26:12-15). It was supposed to be kept in the towns and used as welfare for the porr, the strangers (yes, welfare for the strangers, in the Bible), the levites, the orphans and the widows. But again, mentioning all these categories means that the tithe was supposed to deomnstrate that God is present among His people Israel, for His abundance and mercy can’t be anything else but a sign to His presence. Immanuel, God with us.

In every such example of paying some form of a tithe of making an offering to God, the common element was that the giver sought the presence of God and gave to the place where he saw that presence. The Presence was the factor; while Rushdoony is correct that the giver has the responsibility to decide who deserves the tithe, I think his explanation for the fundamental criteria is inadequate: it’s not where the money will serve the best, it’s where the presence of God is.

But how could a giver decide where the presence of God is? Isn’t he supposed to just accept the word of his ecclesiastical rulers as to where that presence is, as a sign of “submission” to church authorities? Not at all.

In all these cases in the Word, the presence of God was a personal, direct revelation to the giver. Ahimelech the priest knew – from Samuel’s prophecy – that David was God’s beloved. Abraham personally knew Melchizedek was an image of the Son of God. The man from Beth-Shalisha could personally judge that God’s Spirit was with Elisha. Jesus’s disciples had a personal revelation that He was God; “Peter, Peter, flesh and blood did not reveal that to you, but My Father in heaven.” Jacob had a dream and a personal revelation. The presence of God is not determined by institutional arangements. Sometimes He does abide by the institutional arrangements, as long as the leaders of the institution obey His voice – which hasn’t happened too often in history, and is certainly far fom happening today in the so-called “Reformed” or “evangelical” churches. In other times, God is outside the institutions that are officially bearing His name, as He was in the times of the prophets, and in the time of Jesus, and in the time of the Reformation. When God is outside those institutions, it is the responsibility of His worshipers to seek and pray for personal revelation to indicate His presence, and re-direct their tithe accordingly. The tithe is owned to God. Since it is owned to God, it must be paid where God is. If a church or other institution wants that tithe, it must make sure it is obedient to God and therefore has His presence. If not, it doesn’t deserve the tithe, and then it is responsibility of the giver to not give it his tithe, but seek the presence of God.

The presence of God is a concept, however, long-forgotten in our churches. It was the central concept of the Old Covenant. Where God’s presence was decided everything, decided more than than any institutional organization or ceremonial activities could decide. Israel in Elijah’s time had a powerful monarchy, an established Temple hierarchy, was a prosperous and vibrant culture still eating the fruit of blessing from the previous generations; and yet, when Elijah left Israel and went to Mount Sinai, God’s presence was there with him, the lone ranger prophet of no roots and no church membership. (Remember, Elijah was an exile in Israel, he couldn’t even offer his mandatory sacrifices under the Law.) The Bible clearly speaks that it is God’s presence that decides everything; institutional action doesn’t. Even where the institutional leadership has all the power, where the Presence of God is missing, eventually they become powerless and lose their churches, and children, and eventually the culture. The presence of God is a central concept in the New Testament; in fact, this was the very promise of the New Covenant, that God will establish His dwelling place among and in His people, and will walk among them, and that the new name He will be known is Immanuel, God with us. This presence was very obvious in the descriptions of the early church in Acts; both Jews and Gentiles acknowledged that presence. And yet, there is nothing even close to it in our modern churches in America. Our churches are all dead, for all practical purposes; they are all devoid of the presence of God, no one can recognize it there. In fact, if anything, our whole generation – and probably a few generations before us – has lost even the sense of discerning the presence of God. We don’t even know how it looks like, we haven’t even experienced it once, we don’t know what it is to have a church really moved by the Spirit and the Word, all we have is whitewashed tombs that we attend every Sunday to participate in “services” that are grimmer and more somber than a funeral service. And then we demand that people attend them regularly and even pay us money for them.

The tithe, therefore, must be restored in its true meaning and intent; but more important than that, our discernment of the presence of God needs to be restored before anything else is restored. We in the US have been losing not only the culture but also our children and our churches – which is not bad, given that most of those churches are not worth a dime – and that loss has a spiritual reason for it. The Temple was lost when God’s Glory Cloud, God’s presence. This may be the reason we are losing. And the restoration will start when each one of us prays for, seeks earnestly, and through the Holy Spirit develops that discernment thta will make us capable of saying like Jacob, “I can see that God is in this place.” And then act – and tithe – accordingly.

The book I will assign for reading this week is RJ Rushdoony, Tithing and Dominion. While after so many years and attempts at consistent development of my views of tithing, I would like to correct a few details in that book if I could, its general view of the tithe and its relation to dominion and Christian life is unsurpassed in all Christian literature so far. The tithe is not about your church, and not about any church. The tithe is about God and His Kingdom. Once we learn that principle, many things will change to the better.

And remember in your praying and giving Bulgarian Reformation Ministries. God has been with us in Bulgaria, granting success to a mission that, unlike many other missions, has operated on a shoestring budget. We need help to edit translated books, and we need help to publish these books and put them in the hands of Bulgarian Christians. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter (to find out if God’s presence is with our mission) and donate. God bless you all.

Welcome to Episode 62 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will be talking about immigration. To be more precise, we will be talking about immigration in a context that has become so fashionable among Christians and conservatives in general in America: the context of cultural sabotage. Is immigration a good, viable tool for cultural sabotage? Can a civilization be brought down by immigration? The current conservative propaganda in the US says, yes, immigration can be a tool for cultural sabotage and a war against a civilization. This is, however, a rather recent belief among conservatives; as late as the 1990s, they still believed the opposite. But then, again, this is not the only area where conservatives have changed into leftists in the last 20 years. There is almost nothing left of the old conservatism – ironic, isn’t it – in what today passes for conservatism. All of it is just a warmed-over version of the old leftism. Anyway, our purpose here is not to discuss conservatism, but to discuss whether it is at all possible to use immigration as a tool for cultural sabotage. Is it? Can a culture be brought down by immigration?

Before I continue to the topic, I want to tell you a true story. It may sound to you as a fantastic story or a Hollywood movie, but it is a true story; and this true story will reveal to us a characteristic of the minds of men, a property of our psychology which is important to our understanding of how cultural influence and cultural sabotage work.

The character of our story is a German young man by the name of Albrecht Dittrich, who is better known today to those of us who know his story under his American name, Jack Philip Barsky. Albrecht was born in 1949 in East Germany, in the family of hardcore Communists who had decided to stay in the Soviet part of Germany as a matter of ideological convictions. In his later years he even remembered how his father used to speak very highly of Stalin and cried when the dictator died in 1953. With parents so ideologically committed and reliable, Albrecht had no problem being accepted in elite schools, and later to the University of Jena where he was on his way to earn PhD in chemistry and become a university professor. What also helped was that he was exquisitely intelligent and had a superior work ethic. As far humanly predictable, he was being prepared to become part of the Communist elite in East Germany.

This changed abruptly in 1969, when he was only 20 years old. He was approached by an officer of the German secret services, Stasi, and asked if he wanted to get a job with Stasi. He was free to turn down the offer and continue in the same path he had chosen, but if he wanted to take it, he had 24 hours to decide. Intrigued, Dittrich decided to accept. When he was invited to his interview in Berlin, however, it turned out that the real offer was working not for Stasi but for the Soviet KGB. And the job they offered him was not a simple agent in Germany but a spy in the United States.

Over the next several years Dittrich worked on two fronts. He continued studying for, and eventually got his PhD in chemistry, and he taught chemistry to university students. Behind the scenes, however, unknown to his friends and even to his family, he was being trained in all the skills and practices of foreign espionage – like what we see in the movies, but much more applicable and practical – and also English. It took him several years to master the English language and New York accent to the point that he spoke like a true New Yorker. He also learned all the mannerisms of the American culture, watched movies and TV shows and sitcoms and reality shows until he was so immersed in it that he could easily assume the identity of an American and not be caught. By 1978 he was ready to go. He told his parents that he was hired by the Soviet space program and was leaving to the Baikonur Cosmodrome; in order to maintain the story, he wrote dozens of letters which the KGB would regularly drop in the mail in Baikonur over the next several years. Everything was prepared so that he just disappears from his old life in Germany and no one would ask any questions and raise any doubts.

In October 1978, nine years after his recruitment, Dittrich arrived in Chicago with a fake Canadian identity. In the United States, already resident Soviet agents handed him $6,000 and a fake birth certificate for the name of Jack Philip Barsky. They took it from a tombstone in Maryland; the real Jack Barsky was born in 1944 and died at the age of 10 in 1955. His parents were still alive, but the rationale behind the fake identity was that if Dittrich kept a low profile for the first several years, it would be highly improbable that the parents will ever hear of him or suspect anything. He rented an apartment in New York City and settled there.

Dittrich’s task was complex and strategically long-term oriented: He was supposed to first establish himself in the American society and eventually get an American passport. Then, he was expected to become active politically, become involved with foreign policy think-tanks, and make political connections that would take him to the top advisers of the US presidents, placing him in a position to influence policy. His specific target was Zbigniew Brzezinsky, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, but any rise through the political ranks would have been a success. He was also given smaller, tactical tasks of espionage and counter-espionage, including tracking KGB spies who had gone rogue, transmitting information, and others.

The work on the main task, however, didn’t go as planned. His instructors never told him how specifically he was to proceed with getting close to Brzezinsky. Barsky then decided to try to fit as deeply as possible in the American society, and wait for opportunities. He started attending computer science classes at the Baruch University while working as a bicycle messenger in NYC. He earned a degree in computer systems in 1984 with a 4.0 grade point average. As a class valedictorian, he was picked by the dean to deliver a speech to 4,000 students from one of the biggest stages in NYC, Madison Square Garden. Yes, an illegal resident and a cover KGB spy. In the same year he got a computer science job with MetLife in NYC, and started rising through the hierarchy in the company. He still couldn’t figure a way to infiltrate the political circles, but he was in a position to do economic espionage, which the KGB was very happy with, given that in the 1980s, the Soviet Union was lagging disastrously behind the United States in terms of computer technologies.

He continued traveling back to East Germany every two years with fake passports. On his first trip back he married his fiancee there and had a son with her. But then he met a woman in the US, an illegal immigrant from Guyana, and he married her as well and had a daughter with her. It was at this time when he started having a change of mind concerning Communism, America, and his work as a spy. He realized that he was falling in love with America, and more and more he felt like it was his true home and his true country.

In 1988, due to a false alarm, KGB decided that his cover had been blown and he was ordered to return home. He ignored the orders; his family and work in America were everything to him now. A few months later a KGB agent approached him in the subway and warned him that if he didn’t return, he was dead. Barsky then lied to his superiors that he had contracted HIV and had to stay in the US for treatment. At the time, the KGB was scared of the perspective of an HIV epidemics in Eastern Europe; Barsky knew that and correctly gambled on those fears. They left him alone, and a year later his wife in East Germany was officially informed that Albrecht Dittrich was dead. For the first time in 10 years, Barsky could live his American life without having to do espionage. He was still technically illegal, but there was no danger that he would ever be discovered. The KGB’s fears that his cover had been blown turned out to be ungrounded. For over a decade, no one in the US even suspected anything, not even the FBI or the CIA. In terms of efficiency and secrecy, Barsky seems to have been the most successful KGB agent in the US – never discovered, never even suspected. His training and his intelligence might not had prepared him for the task of infiltrating the political circles, but it certainly enabled him to live a fake identity as if it was his own.

One day in 1991, Vasily Mitrokhin, a high-ranking officer in charge of the KGB archive in Moscow, walked in the US Embassy in Riga, the capital of the newly independent republic of Latvia, and requested a meeting with CIA officers. At the meeting, he told them that he had doubles of 25,000 pages of KGB archives in his house, and he offered some samples, telling them that he had everything in his home back in Russia. The CIA operatives didn’t consider his credible and ignored his offer. Mitrokhin then went to the UK embassy and made the same offer to operatives of MI6, the British intelligence service. The Brits took him seriously, paid for his family’s exfiltration to Britain, and sent resident agents of MI6 to retrieve the copies from under the floor of his country house. By 1992, MI6 had the names and residencies of all KGB’s sleeper agents in the West. In 1994, the Brits informed the FBI about Jack Barsky, a KGB agent in New York City.

This information must have come to the FBI as a bolt out of the blue. Spies are human, and they often make mistakes which, if not conclusive evidence, at least create suspicions and draw the attention of the security services. Very few active spies in history have managed to go undetected for long periods of time, even if they maintained a low-key existence. But Jack Barsky managed to go undetected for over 16 years!

By 1994, Barsky had moved from New York to Mount Bethel, PA. With his wife and daughter, he lived in a single family house in a small community. The FBI established a 24-hour surveillance of the family: they wiretapped their house, searched regularly through their trash, they even bought the house next door and moved in a male and a female agent as a “family,” to keep visual surveillance around the clock. And yet, for another three years they couldn’t harvest a single piece of evidence that the man was really a KGB spy. It was only as late as 1997 that Jack Barsky made his first mistake; and he wouldn’t make it if it wasn’t for the fact that his marriage was going downhill. In one of his conversations, in an attempt to earn compassion from his wife, he told her that he had been a spy. This confession was the only thing the FBI had against him. A few days later, he was pulled over by a Pennsylvania state trooper, accompanied by FBI agents. They took him to a local hotel where he was interrogated for the first time.

However, by 1997 – or even ten years earlier, as a matter of fact – Albrecht Dittrich, born in the family of hardline Communists, raised as a Communist in privileges that only children of faithful Communist families enjoyed in Eastern Europe, trained for 9 years ideologically and professionally as a Communist spy, had come to love America with all his heart and mind. It didn’t take much to convince him to co-operate with the FBI. Within two hours after the start of his first interrogation, Barsky was let free to go home with the agreement that he would come back to give the FBI all the information he had. The FBI decided not to charge him, and eventually, he was legalized and was granted US citizenship for his co-operation.

As of today, the US citizen Jack Philip Barsky, now 68 years old, is retired and lives in Atlanta GA. After 1997, he continued his career in computer science and technologies; he was responsible for the developing the software for the new computerized power grid of the state of New York. Oh, and did I forget to mention, while Albrecht Dittrich of 1978 was raised and trained as an atheist, Jack Barsky of today has found and embraced the Christian faith.

As many of my listeners know, about three years ago I delivered three lectures on immigration where I developed the case that the current legal system of immigration restrictions in the US, is neither Biblical, nor historically Christian, nor even Constitutional, according to the Constitution of the United States; and certainly not logical and practical. The true Biblical, historically Christian, Constitutional, and logical and practical system is open borders and limited political franchise. (And contrary to what many Americans believe, even in the context of a welfare state, it is still better and more logical to have open borders; immigration restrictions do not help with a welfare state, they make the situation much worse.) My purpose here is not to repeat my arguments; you can find the lectures on Reconstructionist Radio, under the tag Christendom Restored. What is important to to us here is a question asked in the fourth audio of that series, the Q&A session, namely, “If we open our borders, couldn’t the Chinese government use it to send 40 million Chinese who through voting would eventually influence the political life in the United States in favor of China?”

In other words, if we open our borders, wouldn’t that also open America to cultural sabotage? Wouldn’t that make us vulnerable, for governments around the world would eagerly take the opportunity to plant as many of their residents as they can and make America a servant of their interests? What’s going to happen to our beautiful American culture if we allow all these foreign governments to infest the land with their residents, millions of them? We will see in a moment how absurd these fears are, but keep in mind, this is major scare among many Christians and conservatives in general. I have been asked this same question even by people who are otherwise intelligent and some are even professors of economics or sociology – and they truly believe that such an absurd scenario is possible, even though it has never been observed in history.

My reply in the Q&A session started with the technical analysis of the scenario. (Later, I will give you the ethical/judicial analysis as well.) In short, for the Chinese government to be able to plant 40 million immigrants in the United States, it will have to organize the logistics for transporting them and helping them settle. The average cost per immigrant person – from the preparations back home, through the transportation costs, through finding a home in the US and settling until the immigrant finds a job – is about $5,000. And this is the lower end of it; the costs may be much higher if the immigrant can’t find a job in the first several months of his stay in the US. But for our purposes, we will take the lower end of it.

Right there, in order to send 40 million Chinese, the Chinese government will have an initial tab of about $200 billion to pay, and the very minimum. While this is nothing compared to the Chinese economy, remember that this is still 5% of their government budget. 5% devoted to a single specific task is a little too much. And this is only part of the cost. For these people to be able to survive in the United States for several years, before they get their citizenship, they need to be educated better than the average Chinese citizen: They need to speak English, they need to be able to find jobs, etc., otherwise their stay in the US until the time they can take the citizenship oath would have to be sponsored by the Chinese government, and living in the US is way more expensive than living in China. So it’s much cheaper if they educate their residents back home to prepare them to live and survive on their own in the US. But the average – that’s only the average, not the above average needed for that better level of education – cost of education in China is about $1,600 per year. (In the Q&A session I mentioned $1,000, but in the last year, the American National Center for Education and the Economy came up with the $1,600 figure based on data from the Ministry of Education of China.) Even if all these people have only high school – not university education – this is 12 years times $1,600 times 40 million, an additional cost of about $800 billion. Total of $1 trillion – at the very minimum – before these people even begin establishing themselves in the US.

But the real cost doesn’t stop there. There are hidden costs which, while not always visible, can prove to be devastating to a national economy. Remember, nations invest in education because they expect that that education will eventually pay off through the future productive labor of the students. GDP, after all, is produced by people; if you remove these people, you also remove the possibility for them working and covering the cost for their education. China’s GDP is about $8,000 per person – that is the average, and includes everyone, including the non-working parts of the population, students and retirees. In reality, the average working person in China adds about $16,000 dollars to their GDP every year. The removal of 40 million people in active working age will mean the loss of 640 billion from the GDP every year. In addition, sending them to the US, where the GDP per capita is a bit lower than $60,000, and the GDP per working person is over $100,000, China thus will add about $4 trillion worth of GDP per year to the US economy – and for workers whose education cost zero to the US economy. That is, over their first 5 years in the US – needed to obtain citizenship – China would have lost over $3 trillion in forgone productivity, and the US will have gained $20 trillion from these 40 million immigrants. And that before they are even eligible to become citizens and vote. Does such an operation even make sense? It would rather be a Pyrrhic victory of gigantic proportions, a guaranteed enormous loss now for some skimpy chance of success in the unforeseeable future.

Thus, even before we get to the ethical/judicial analysis of the issue, the technical analysis shows that if China decided to take advantage of open borders and send 40 million Chinese to the US, this would mean a major loss to the Chinese economy, and will be a serious contribution to the American economy. No matter what you believe about the economy, people are an asset, and all thing being equal, the more of them you have, the larger your economy becomes. Remember, America shot up to be No. 1 economy in the world exactly during the era of open borders. From a small regional power in 1870, she grew to produce 25% of the world’s GDP in 1920. And during much this time, she took about a million immigrants every year. People are an asset.

So what about the ethical/judicial analysis? Yes, the Chinese government may still invest all that money, and may still decide to forgo the benefits of having these people working back home. But wouldn’t it be worth the task of cultural sabotage? Wouldn’t the long-term benefits of subverting the American culture and political life be worth the effort and the investment?

And here is the place to ask that one-trillion-dollar question: even if the Chinese government – or any other government in the world – invests so much money to send so many residents to the US with the purpose to use them in the future to influence elections and the culture in general . . . how are they going to be able to control the individual decisions of so many people? How would they know who votes how? How would they be able to force even a small minority of these people to not do what’s in their personal interest and work for a government that has kept its people so poor compared to Americans? Once these people are US citizens, their previous government has no mechanism whatsoever to control their voting or any of their decisions. Remember Jack Barsky: he wasn’t even a citizen, his position was so precarious, and yet, even he couldn’t be kept under control; and remember, he was specifically trained for his job, a training that cost way more than just 12 years of school!

Years after he was discovered, Barsky was able to lay his hands on the Mitrokhin Archive: the same archive that uncovered him as an agent. He studied it carefully – Barsky spoke Russian fluently, given that two years of his training as a spy was done in Moscow, at the KGB center – and came to the conclusion that he was part of the third of total three waves of spies that the KGB tried to plant in the West. There were dozens of other agents who were sent years before him or about the same time as him. All of the three waves failed miserably to achieve anything close to the original objectives; and the main reason for the failure was – you could easily guess – that the agents kept defecting once they were on the American side of the border. Barsky himself was charged with tracking defected agents as part of his assignment; and when in 1988 he refused to return to East Germany, his superiors were afraid that he would defect. (He never officially defected, but at the time, his ideological commitment was already gone.) The question is: if the KGB couldn’t keep their own agents – trained so thoroughly, and having so much to lose, including their lives – in line, what makes us believe that any other government would be able to keep under control millions of its former citizens who are now US citizens? It would be ridiculous to believe that such control is even possible, let alone such a gigantic operation of cultural sabotage.

Ridiculous as it is, even great minds have fallen prey to such knee-jerk thinking and have imagined that such a scenario is even possible. One such mind was Murray Rothbard. Lew Rockwell related in one of his articles how Murray Rothbard, when he was still a young libertarian, used to support open borders (which, obviously, is the logically consistent libertarian position, no matter what Lew Rockwell imagines), but then, later in his life, he changed his mind against open borders and supported closed borders. Lew Rockwell’s explanation for this change of mind is an amazing testimony of how even the brightest minds have moment when they think at an elementary, simple, knee-jerk reaction level:

[QUOTE] He noted, for instance, the large number of ethnic Russians whom Stalin settled in Estonia. This was not done so that Baltic people could enjoy the fruits of diversity. It never is. It was done in an attempt to destroy an existing culture, and in the process to make a people more docile and less likely to cause problems for the Soviet empire.

Murray wondered: does libertarianism require me to support this, much less to celebrate it? Or might there be more to the immigration question after all? [END OF QUOTE]

One wonders: What was in Rothbard’s mind at the time that he couldn’t stop and see that government resettling of populations has nothing to do with open borders? But since our focus here is on the question of cultural sabotage, looking back historically, we can ask, did it really work? Was Stalin successful in destroying the cultures of the Baltic republics? The answer is: not at all. As much as Stalin tried to destroy the independent spirit of the peoples of the Baltic republics, it did not disappear.. To the contrary, it remained alive, and when the weakness of the Soviet Empire was obvious at the end of the 1980s, the three republics declared independence. Estonia, in fact, declared independence as early as 1988, before any other Eastern European country had thrown off Communist rule. And what about all these Russians that Stalin had resettled in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania? Most of them joined the independence movement. Even as today, Estonia and Latvia have about 30% of their population ethnic Russians. All these Russians can return to Russia, if they want to, instead of living in a “foreign” country. They all prefer to stay in Estonia and Latvia. And the culture? Well, the culture in these two countries is Estonian and Latvian. Contrary to Stalin’s plans, and contrary to Rothbard’s fears. Because a culture can’t be destroyed by immigration. Not a superior culture, at any rate.

And here is the most important concept of this episode: a superior culture can never be destroyed by immigration.

Ironically, one of the regular complaints of Christians, conservatives, and secular libertarians against the political Left and against the so-called “cultural Marxists” (which is an oxymoron, as I explained in a previous episode) is that the political Left insists that there are no superior cultures, that all cultures are equally valuable. The Christian, conservative, and libertarian part of the spectrum always replies: That’s not true, some cultures are superior to others, and some cultures are so inferior that they are not worth preserving. The goal of the political Left, however, is not an attack on the Western culture: such attack is impossible from the position of non-Western cultures. After all, who would want to abandon the prosperity of the West for the misery and poverty and chaos and injustice of the Third World cultures? The goal of the political Left is to prevent the Western civilization, with its at least remote Christian roots, from expanding and assimilating those inferior cultures. Why is it? Because the political Left knows one truth: In the interaction between a superior culture and an inferior culture, it is the inferior culture that loses, and eventually gets assimilated. Cultural sabotage never works in favor of the inferior cultures; even when the inferior culture is more powerful in terms of military power, population, money, etc. Like Stalin’s Communism was more powerful than the traditionally Christian Baltic cultures. Or like Pagan Rome was more powerful than the fledgling early Church. This process of defeating inferior cultures is known today as “evangelism.”

The Bible speaks clearly of such cultural sabotage, in Deut. 4:5-8:

See, I have taught you statutes and judgments just as the LORD my God commanded me, that you should do thus in the land where you are entering to possess it. So keep and do them,for that is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes and say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.” For what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as is the LORD our God whenever we call on Him? Or what great nation is there that has statutes and judgments as righteous as this whole law which I am setting before you today?

The superiority of a culture, therefore, is expressed not in its might and power, but in its justice, in the righteousness of its ethical and legal foundations. Foreigners, no matter how indoctrinated they are with their own original culture, will eventually submit and acknowledge the superiority of a culture that is more righteous and more just. Granted, there may be a few who, due to vested interests, or due to self-conscious commitment to evil, or because God has hardened their hearts, may resist the clear evidence in front of their eyes, but as a general rule, the majority of those who come to witness and understand a culture of superior justice and righteousness, will eventually come to love it.

Solomon as a king was known throughout the world for his wisdom; and his wisdom was expressed in the fact that he judged his people with righteousness, because this is what he asked of God in 1 Kings 3:9: “So give Your servant an understanding heart to judge Your people to discern between good and evil. For who is able to judge this great people of Yours?” Once his fame of a righteous judge was established, however, and he built the Temple, Solomon’s prayer was not that his kingdom’s borders were closed and no foreigners were allowed in, so that no one could sabotage their wonderful culture, but exactly the opposite:

Also concerning the foreigner who is not of Your people Israel, when he comes from a far country for Your name’s sake (for they will hear of Your great name and Your mighty hand, and of Your outstretched arm); when he comes and prays toward this house, hear in heaven Your dwelling place, and do according to all for which the foreigner calls to You, in order that all the peoples of the earth may know Your name, to fear You, as do Your people Israel, and that they may know that this house which I have built is called by Your name (1 Kings 8:41-43).

Other nations, of course, had temples just as magnificent and beautiful as the Temple of Solomon. There was no reason why strangers would come only to see the beauty of the Temple. (And remember, for several generations God had no Temple, only the Tabernacle, and He declared that the Tabernacle was enough for Him.) The real attraction of Israel was not architectural but ethical/judicial: Solomon’s wisdom in judgment. The Queen of Sheba could have brought her large retinue to any other land with magnificent temples – and, if Velikovsky’s chronology is correct, which I believe it is, she was actually the Egyptian queen Hatshepsut, which means she had magnificent temples back home, in her own land. But she came to hear of his wisdom, and she acknowledged that the Lord had established him to do justice and righteousness (1 Kings 10:9).

But under the New Covenant, such is to be the standing of every nation which acknowledges the God of the Bible and establishes its legal system and its culture on His Law. Under the Old Covenant, Israel needed specially inspired rulers and kings, like Moses, Joshua, David, Samuel, Solomon, to maintain justice and righteousness. Under the New Covenant, it is the very essence of the Gospel that a nation’s justice system should be founded on the Law of God (see 1 Tim. 1:8-11; “according to the glorious Gospel”). Israel under Solomon was a peculiarity under the Old Covenant; under the New Covenant, the Great Commission commands us to make every nation do justice and righteousness as Solomon was commanded. A Christian nation, therefore, would be a nation where the morals and the laws are in harmony with the Law of God. The closer to the Law of God a nation’s morals and laws are, the more attractive it will be in the eyes of the people from other nations. Such nation should not be afraid to let strangers come to it. No visitor or spy or immigrant can sabotage a truly Christian nation; but it will sabotage the hearts of those who come to it, and will turn them away from their paganism. Just like the KGB’s work was sabotaged and their plans thwarted, the hearts of men always eventually surrender. There is no reason for fear.

The only question we need to answer now is: what about those cultures who disappeared and were defeated in history? What about Rome that was overwhelmed by the immigrating Goths and Slavs and Huns, and later the Muslims: a superior civilization overrun by Barbarians. What about Byzantium, another superior civilization overrun by Muslims? Aren’t these examples that a superior culture can be defeated by inferior cultures?

No, they aren’t. In all these examples, it was the superior culture that destroyed itself long before the Barbarians got to it. Rome was already rotten when the Germans started arriving at its borders; the old moral and civic virtues which characterized the Kingdom and then the Republic of Rome were gone by the time of Julius Caesar. Those old virtues – copied from the expanding influence of Solomon’s Israel several centuries earlier – helped Rome survive the Punic Wars and even expand. Their enemy, Carthage, an heir of the Phoenician city of Tyre, still practiced child sacrifice that was an integral part of the religion of their motherland, as described in the Bible. God wouldn’t let such culture survive and thrive for a long time. But later Rome, although never engaging in child sacrifice themselves, adopted similar practices, including abortion; and instead of a quest for justice, the Roman legal system became a tool for oppression and injustice. By the time of Julius Caesar, the only splendor Rome had was its architecture; ethics and justice had disappeared. When the Barbarians came a couple centuries later, few were eager and willing to defend a culture that had lost all sense of morality and justice. In fact, if anything, it was those same Barbarians who tried to restore it; and if anything survived, it was because of Christianity.

A superior culture, therefore, never dies from outside attacks or sabotage; it always sabotages the hearts of its enemies and converts the best and brightest of them to its own service. Just like Christendom converted its pagan enemies – the Celts, the Saxons, the Scandinavians, the Slavs – and then made out of them more fierce and committed defenders and evangelists of the faith than the Jews or the Romans ever were. But when a culture begins to give way before its enemies, it can be for one reason only: it has become rotten.

And when it has become rotten, it is not worth defending. And when it is not worth defending, no immigration restrictions will save it. They will only destroy liberty, and will make it even more rotten. But they will never save it.

In the final account, American Christians and conservatives in general need not fear. Immigration is not a good tool for cultural sabotage. Any foreign government which decides to spend the resources and send thousands or millions of immigrants to achieve cultural and political goals in the US, is taking serious risks, and will eventually lose those resources without achieving anything of value. Individual people have their individual interests, and most of the time their individual interests are on the side of that culture that can provide them with more justice; their dictators back home can’t compete with the US on that account. Eventually, even those specially trained and ideologically committed – like Jack Barsky – will surrender before the overwhelming evidence of the superiority of a culture.

But if you are concerned about America, you better start looking for dangers inside its culture. America can’t be brought down by foreign enemies; but her most dangerous enemies are those inside who want to deprive her of her freedom, and those who want to remove from her midst the religion that has protected that freedom for centuries. Look for these enemies in the seats of power, both in the civil government, and in the pulpits. Especially the pulpits.

The book I will assign for reading this week is Deep Under Cover: My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy in America, by Jack Barsky and Joe Reilly. If you wonder who Joe Reilly is, he is the FBI agent who was with that Pennsylvania state trooper when Barsky was first arrested and taken for interrogation. The two men later became close friends. When you read the book, pay special attention to the change in Barsky’s mind year after year, while living in America and experiencing her culture first hand. Barsky is not alone. There are millions like him who have made the US their true allegiance, abandoning the allegiances to their former dictators and slave masters.

In your prayers and giving, consider Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization devoted to expanding the Kingdom of God in Eastern Europe through preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ to every area of man’s life and institutions. Our focus is not just on saving people’s souls but in building a culture that will reflect Jesus Christ and His righteousness and justice. Visit BulgarianReformation.com to learn more about our work and our view of how missions should be done in the modern world. Subscribe to the newsletter for updates, and prayerfully donate for publishing and translations, which will help us build the intellectual foundation for the Christian culture in Bulgaria. God bless you all.