Christendom Restored with Bojidar Marinov | Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Network

Immigration and the Sabbath

Hear, O Israel, the statutes and the ordinances which I am speaking today in your hearing, that you may learn them and observe them carefully. The LORD our God made a covenant with us at Horeb. The LORD did not make this covenant with our fathers, but with us, with all those of us alive here today. The LORD spoke to you face to face at the mountain from the midst of the fire, while I was standing between the LORD and you at that time, to declare to you the word of the LORD; for you were afraid because of the fire and did not go up the mountain.

In the first chapters of Deuteronomy, Moses was standing in front of Israel, in the wilderness of the desert (literally), with the purpose of repeating the Law of God to the sons and daughters of the second generation of Israelites. These were not the actual slaves who came out of Egypt. These were not the people who actually stood under the mountain, who watched God speak from the Mountain, who rebelled against Moses, who wanted to go back to Egypt. His listeners in the wilderness beyond Jordan either had been born after God made the covenant with Israel, or were too young to understand what had happened under Sinai. The actual slaves were dead. As God vowed, not a single one of them would enter the Promised Land, not even Moses. With two exceptions, of course: The two men who 40 years before that defied their fear, defied the slave mentality developed after several generations of slavery, and called Israel to enter the Promised Land and take dominion over it: Joshua (an Israelite) and Caleb (a Kennezite, a foreigner of Canaanitic origin). The time period separating the two events is the same time period separating us today from President Nixon’s resignation in the Watergate Scandal; except that, there were no news agencies nor multimedia online storage facilities to keep the memory alive. Everyone among these listeners knew about Sinai from his parents and from the collective memory of the whole community. But none of them were really there, except for two men.

And yet, Moses told them that the covenant God made on the Mount Sinai was made with them, not with their parents. After which he proceeded to repeat to them the same Ten Commandments he gave their fathers. Well, not exactly the same. There was a slight change in the Commandments. Or, not so slight. The change was in the Fourth Commandment. Or rather, in the legal and logical foundation for the Fourth Commandment.

The text of the Fourth Commandment God gave to the previous generation was,

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy (Ex. 20:8-11).

But to the children he changed the reasoning:

Observe the sabbath day to keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant or your ox or your donkey or any of your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you, so that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out of there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to observe the sabbath day (Deut. 5:12-15).

The change is very interesting, isn’t it? And it is, again, part of a line of paradoxical statements by God to His people. After telling them that the covenant on Sinai wasn’t made with the fathers who were actually there, He must have gotten their attention. “Wait, what happened before us was actually meant for us?” Now God was telling, “Not only was it meant for you, you are expected to remember a slavery you have never been through yourself.” An interesting proposition given the fact that the Bible seldom advises people to look back to the past. The past has this power of attraction: from the distance of time, it always looks much better to us than it actually was. Lot’s wife looked back, even when forbidden to. The Hebrews slaves in the wilderness remembered Egypt with the things that were given to them for free. (Forgot about the whips?) But God’s true people always look forward, to the promised redemption, to a redeemed history of victory for the Gospel. As Paul said, “forgetting what lies behind, pressing forward” (Phil. 3:13), because, “the future belongs to you” (1 Cor. 3:22).

But there was a legitimate remembrance of the past, and it had to do with mistreatment and oppression. Mistreatment of God, and mistreatment of our fellow man. (Opposite to the two great commandments, “Love God” and “Love your neighbor.”) Deuteronomy 8 warns the Israelites to not forget God and His works when He brought them out of Egypt. Forgetting God and His works would be a mistreatment of God, an act of injustice to Him. Again, in Deut. 8 Moses was speaking to the children who hadn’t seen the great works of God, and yet were expected to remember.

And the other instance when the Israelites had to remember was when they were tempted to mistreat their neighbor, those weaker than them in the society, those who couldn’t defend themselves either by the use of force or by the courts. It started with their weaker ones at home, their servants, their employees, the children under their care, and even their animals. And the foreigners who stayed in their home.

We have this religious, ritualistic, mystical idea today about the Sabbath, that God gave the Fourth Commandment so that we have special liturgy and magic ceremonies to make God pleased with us. But the Biblical message is very clear that the central purpose of the Sabbath was to declare liberty and justice throughout the land; liberty and justice for all, from the smallest to the greatest in a culture. “Remember you were a slave,” God told the Israelites when they were about to enter the land to possess it. “Let this Day of Rest remind you of the days when you worked without rest, without hope in the world, under cruel oppressors, without any recourse against them, and without any future for your children except the same constant toil.” Egypt did not recognize Jehovah, and did not recognize a day of rest for the slaves. Pagan servitude was a constant toil. In another time, under another pagan regime, another committed pagan, Marcus Porcius Cato, incorrectly believed by many today to have been a champion of liberty, declared his maxim to be that when a slave is not sleeping, he should be working. Cruelty to slaves was the standard in pagan societies; and why not, if, as Aristotle believed, people who are slaves were “naturally so,” not being different in principle from animals.

The Sabbath rejected this standard of cruelty and substituted another standard for it: The slave—and all the weaker members of the society—were equal in status to those who are powerful, rich, and important. The worth of the individual—of any individual, not just a few—was established in this Commandment by making the Israelites stop and remember that they were slaves, too. Remember, o Israelite, you were a slave—not just your parents, but you, too. Remember, o American, you were oppressed and persecuted and declared an outlaw and a stranger in your own land; not just your parents several generations ago, but you, too. At the end of the week all those in a weaker position deserved rest; and the animals, as well. When an Israelite heard “remember,” it meant to him, “treat others as you would want to be treated in their situation.” The Sabbath was a day of freedom for man, and the Sabbath year was a year of freedom for the debtors in Israel, and the Sabbath of the Sabbaths, the Jubilee year, was meant to see the freeing all people from all bondage.

I believe our churches today are still ignorant as to the true meaning of Jesus’s words, “the Sabbath was made for man” (Mark 2:27). We still take these words casually, either as having no important meaning or as declaring the Sabbath to be simply at man’s disposal to be used pragmatically or according to expediency. But “made for man” means much more; the meaning is that man is valued and cared for on the Sabbath. His disciples were picking grains of wheat to eat on that day when Jesus declared that the Sabbath was made for man. Their hunger required that they picked grains, for “the Sabbath was made for man.” His multiple cases of healing on Sabbath pointed to the same truth. “And this woman, a daughter of Abraham as she is, whom Satan has bound for eighteen long years, should she not have been released from this bond on the Sabbath day?” Jesus asked in Luke 13:16. Of course she should; that’s what the Sabbath was for, setting the captives free. And again,

“Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save a life or to kill?” But they kept silent. After looking around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, He said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” (Mark 3:4-5).

The “remember you were a slave” clause was not just an isolated little clause. It was repeated several times in the Law. “Remember you were a slave” and set your brother free in the Sabbath year, and furnish him liberally from your possessions; don’t send him away empty-handed (Deut. 15:12-15). “Remember you were a slave” an on the Day of Pentecost celebrate not alone, not with your rich buddies only, but invite the stranger, the orphan, and the widow (Deut. 16:9-12). “Remember you were a slave” and do not pervert justice due a stranger, an orphan, or a widow (Deut. 24:17-18). The next verse, again, “remember you were a slave” and do not go back to the field to pick up the sheaves you have forgotten while harvesting; leave them for the stranger, the orphan, and the widow. The next verse, again, “remember you were a slave” and do not go over your vineyard again when picking your grapes; leave them for the stranger, the orphan, and the widow. There was no government agency forcing compliance; God Himself was the enforcement, and the implicit threat was serious enough to make a God-fearing man stop and consider: “If you forget you were a slave and start oppressing these people, I will return you back to your slavery, and you will learn again.” And guess what, God returned them back to their slavery, and then again, and then again.

Stop here and think, before I continue: When the rest of the world is painfully shaking off the chains of socialism, why is America adopting it, in the face of all evidence against it? Could there be a higher, more transcendent reason for it? We like to blame the liberals. But could it be that the fault lies with us, the Christians and the conservatives in general? Could it be that we have forgotten that we were slaves and we have mistreated the orphan and the widow . . . and the stranger? Why are we losing the cultural war, why do our efforts in the culture seem so futile, as if we are fighting against a superior spiritual force? Does the enemy really posses such spiritual power to block the efforts and the prayers of the Church? Or may be . . . just may be . . . our opponent is the Holy Spirit Himself, enforcing the Law against us, the American church, because we have violated the Sabbath Commandment in its true meaning and intent?

Just keep this as a thought.

The Sabbath Law, of course, is much more extensive than we might want to think. As much as we’d like to limit it to two hours on Sunday, or to not working one day of seven, it goes beyond that. It covers every act of pretended service or worship to God, whether it is singing praises, fasting, celebrating days and new moons, etc. And everywhere God tells us, “Do not presume to think that what I need is your rituals and pageants. What I need is justice, and mercy to those weaker than you.” “Is this not the fast I choose,” says the Lord in Isaiah 58, “To loosen the bonds of wickedness, to undo the bands of the yoke, and to let the oppressed go free, and break every yoke”? Because of the Sabbath, He says again in the same chapter, turn your foot from doing your own pleasure. Only then, He promises again in the same chapter, you will rebuild the ancient ruins and will be called repairer of the breach. Think again, why haven’t we, conservatives, been able to even conserve anything, let alone rebuild? Could it be because we have not set the oppressed free? Could it be that we have been accomplices in oppression instead?

Just like the Sabbath Law in general, the Remember Clause is much more extensive in the Bible. It is not just remember that you were a slave. It gets more specific than that. God returned their memory to the past on another issue, too. That they were slaves was an important foundation for how they treated everyone. But they were something else, too, and God used that as well.

“You were strangers in the land of Egypt,” He said in Exodus 22:21, therefore you shall not wrong nor oppress a stranger. Remember, the Hebrews became strangers in Egypt by economic immigration. They could have stayed back home and starved to death, in the time of Joseph. But they came to Egypt to ask for food, and because of a righteous Pharaoh, one who respected Joseph and the God of Joseph, they were invited to stay. The famine that brought the Hebrews to Egypt was the same famine that made all Egyptians slaves to their Pharaoh. The Hebrews—the immigrants—remained free in a land where the native population was enslaved. This may be the reason why the Hebrews became mightier than the Egyptians, as Exodus 1:9 relates. But then, by God’s design, they became slaves (see Gen. 15:13, “God said to Abram, Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, where they will be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years”). God Himself planned their slavery and their being strangers, with the purpose to teach them a lesson they were not supposed to forget. The memory was to keep them aware that the stranger in their land deserved special love and compassion, and equal protection under the Law.

That the stranger was given equal rights under the Law as the homeborn was a totally novel concept in the pagan world. Our modern liberal historians trip over each other to present Rome and Greece as the paragons of justice and social virtue. But the truth was, a foreigner had no equal rights in any of the Greek city states—in fact, he had no rights, period. Once a person left the borders of his hometown, he was without any protection. So horrible was the fate of a foreigner that in Greece, exile was considered worse punishment than death penalty. Even the homeborn who associated with foreigners were at risk of losing their rights. The great statesman and general of Athens, Pericles, who committed his whole life to the service of his city, could not marry the woman he loved, Aspasia. Why? She was a foreigner, and he risked being ostracized and exiled if he married a foreigner. And she was as Greek as anyone else in Athens, and of the same ethnic family, at that, Ionian Greeks, being from Miletus. But even that was too much for the ancient pagans. The stranger was not protected, not welcome, because the gods of the city felt offended by the presence of strangers. Many pagan cultures today brag about their “traditional hospitality.” Nonsense. Hospitality became a virtue only with the advent of Christianity. In the ancient world, hospitality was unknown outside the nation of Israel. Any hospitality shown was the personal whim of the host; but there was no ethical system that encouraged hospitality.

But in Israel, God specifically declared the stranger of equal rights with the homeborn. To teach the lesson, God made a whole nation become strangers in a foreign land, so that they knew and remembered what it’s like. The Remember Clause included the foreigners, and oppression of foreigners was forbidden for the same reason oppression of slaves and weaker members of the society was forbidden: “Remember that you were also a foreigner.” The Fourth Commandment protected the foreigner as well.

But God didn’t stop there. He placed even higher requirements on the Hebrew nation. In Deuteronomy 23:7, He commanded the following:

You shall not detest an Edomite, for he is your brother; you shall not detest an Egyptian, because you were an alien in his land.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it. But remember, if you go to Numbers 20, you will find out that Edom actually refused to allow Israel to pass through their land, and they showed up with “heavy force” to prevent the Israelites from passing. Israel needed to use the wells and the rivers for themselves and their animals, and they were willing to pay for all the water they used. Edom said “no,” and lined up for battle, effectively instituting immigration restrictions against Israel; restrictions that could have easily led to Israel’s extermination in the waterless desert. Edom’s hatred against Israel continued for many centuries; in fact, in the last siege of Jerusalem in AD 70, Edomite troops were the most fervent allies of the Romans, and the Roman generals had to restrain them from committing barbaric atrocities against the Jewish defenders. Moses’s listeners were familiar with what Edom had committed, for they were the children who had to go without water for many miles, because of Edom’s hatred. And the Egyptians were exactly the nation where Israel was enslaved. And yet, God commanded, “do not detest them, but remember, you were a foreigner.” Not only was the stranger worthy of equal protection and respect, but even members of the worst enemies of Israel were to be treated without partiality, and not detested.

Now, let’s stop here and consider: Do you understand the grave significance of this command for you, Texans? Or should I say, Texians? Go back to the past and remember, were you a foreigner in someone else’s land? Do you dare detest the Mexican, in whose land you were a stranger, just as the Israelites were strangers in the land of the Egyptian? Do you think God only gave that commandment to the Israelites; that God’s moral principles are not eternal and applicable to all men? When you say the words, “Remember Alamo,” what is the motive deep in your heart? Is it the Biblical motive, to remember that you were a mistreated foreigner and therefore treat the Mexican with respect so that the trail of mutual distrust and hatred is broken and God’s Law and God’s peace prevail?

Or do you want the same for the Mexican as General Santa Ana would have for you if he had his way: walls, barbed wire, towers with machine guns, military helicopters shooting at unarmed people, and hatred and fear and hostility?

Are you a Biblical Christian, obeying God’s Law, when it comes to the Mexican? Or are you a Barbaric pagan, blinded by hatred to all that is foreign to you?

The words “because you were a stranger” appear in so many other places in the Law of God that we won’t have the time to cover them all. The very concept of being a stranger deserves a series of lectures in its own accord. But for our understanding of the Biblical policy on immigration, it is important to understand that the Fourth Commandment, of keeping the Sabbath, was a warning against oppression—oppression of the weaker members of our families and our society, oppression of the stranger, oppression of the slaves under our jurisdiction.

Given these principles in the Law, it should be of no surprise that the Law contains not a single prescription for limiting immigration. It couldn’t. Such a prescription would violate the whole character of the Law of God, and would violate specifically the “Remember Clause”: “Remember you were a slave, and a foreigner.” Limiting the freedom of movement of a man who hasn’t committed any crime, for the simple reason that he was a foreigner, would be treating a stranger more harshly than a homeborn. That was illegal, wicked, immoral, and totally anti-Christian. It would mean oppression of the weaker members of the society. It would make America . . . er, I mean, Israel . . . fall to the level of the Barbaric pagan nations in the antiquity. Israel was not allowed to close any borders, neither was the king allowed to have a swarm of bureaucrats who controlled the movement of foreigners through the borders. The decision of a man to move and settle was left entirely to the man himself; God refused the civil government the power to block the access of certain classes to the territory and the economic life of Israel. Caleb the Kennezite, Uriah the Hittite, Obed-edom the Philistine (later leader of the singers in the Temple), Ruth the Moabite, and countless other foreigners could come to Israel and take advantage of the opportunities there. Some could end up adopted by Hebrew families and also take ownership in the land. Those who chose to get circumcised and become part of Israel could receive political rights after several generations. Others could remain pagans and even worship their idols in the confines of their homes; as long as their worship was not public, they were safe from interference. As far as individual rights were concerned, there was to be one law for the stranger and for the homeborn. No passports, no border control, no extensive government apparatus to control the movement of people, no forcing private businesses to spend resources on verifying the “legal status” of their employees, no immigration crises, no compulsion on the local businesses to hire locals over foreigners, etc., etc. The access to political suffrage was limited; but the access to the land and the market and the job market wasn’t.

To our brainwashed modern Christians and conservatives such proposition sounds extreme. How would Israel protect their culture from all those unwashed Mexicans around them? Here was Israel, a small nation surrounded by greater nations, with open land routes to everywhere, with no central government, no police, and God missed giving them laws to restrict immigration? And the surrounding cultures were self-consciously pagan and hostile to Israel’s religion. Come on, God. We have 300 million people in America today, the most powerful nation that ever existed, protected by two oceans, the most obvious example to the world of the success of its culture, and we are panicking at the sight of a few thousand immigrants, how could You hope to protect the tiny nation of Israel without immigration laws?

To add insult to the injury, not only didn’t God give them any laws for immigration restrictions, He actually put a ban on deporting immigrants. In the same chapter where the Israelites were commanded to not detest the Edomite and the Egyptian, Deut. 23, the following commandment was given in verses 15 and 16:

You shall not hand over to his master a slave who has escaped from his master to you. He shall live with you in your midst, in the place which he shall choose in one of your towns where it pleases him; you shall not mistreat him.

Not only Israel could not restrict immigration, they could not deport immigrants either. The Biblical principle of Israel as the shining city on a hill was applied thoroughly. Come to Israel, the Law said, and be free. Come to the only place in the world where a foreigner can find his true home and have peace. To understand the importance of this specific law we need to understand the ancient world: The largest slave owners in the pagan nations were usually the politically and militarily powerful. Slaves were most often acquired in military expeditions, and the powerful of the day took the lion’s share of the plunder. For Israel to refuse to deport a slave back to his foreign pagan master meant that the master could incite his government—or he may have been the government himself—to go to war with Israel. This law spelled possible international conflict for Israel for every slave who could decide to find asylum in Israel. God didn’t care. He was very specific, and very clear: Not only you will not deport a fugitive slave, but you will allow the slave to decide where he wants to settle and live. And if you have to go to war for every slave, you will go to war for every slave. Because, remember, you were a foreigner, and a slave, and therefore, if you want to be righteous before me, you will defend and protect the foreigner and the slave. Three thousand years before the US was founded, another nation was commanded to declare to the world,

“Give me your tired, your poor,

How does America compare to this Biblical principle today? Let me remind you: Thousands of German Jews were refused entry in the US in the 1930s because of immigration restrictions. And the American church remained silent. And today, the same American church insists on more immigration restrictions, more government power to restrict the movement of individuals, not to mention radical murderous measures like machine guns and military helicopters on the border, to shoot at unarmed people. Who knows how many Christian brothers we have returned to their pagan masters with our immigration laws? Who knows how many decent men and women who were looking for gainful employment to provide for their children have we returned to their poverty and misery and darkness and ignorance? Let me ask you: Could it be that we are losing America to fascism today exactly because we have failed to search the Word of God on this issue, and have sided with the fascists, as a church? Could it be that God is bringing judgment on us because we have been acting as Barbaric pagans, mistreating and oppressing the stranger with our support for wicked immigration laws?

From a legal perspective, government control of the borders for movement of individuals would mean that the civil government declares itself to be the owner of the land, not servant of God for the good of the people. But the Law didn’t give the land to the government, it gave it to the families. If there was to be any “immigration control,” it was to be enforced by the true owners, the families. One family may not like foreigners, another may welcome them as workers and may be even adopted sons. Boaz specifically advised his workers to leave more sheaves for Ruth the Moabite immigrant. He was responsible to decide whether this immigrant alien would be able to take advantage of his land or not, not some government. One of the warnings Samuel gave Israel when they wanted a king was that the king would take their fields. Indeed, the evil king Ahab killed an innocent man to acquire his property. What is seldom understood by Christians today is that giving the civil government power over immigration actually declares the civil government to be the owner of the land. And indeed, most of the time the argument for restricting immigration is, “Can I stop someone from entering my backyard?” You can, but the land is not the backyard of the government, you fool. Because once you declare it to be the backyard of the government, you can’t complain when the government takes it away from you. Should we be surprised that the era of immigration restrictions in the US is also the era of the legal principle of eminent domain? If you want the government to act as owner of the land against the foreigner, the next thing you should expect is that it acts as owner of the land against you. God is not mocked. Not at a zero cost, at least. The way you treat the foreigner will be the way you get treated.

But weren’t there borders in the Bible? Weren’t there political boundaries between the states in the ancient world? If there were, wasn’t the government responsible for securing the borders?

There were. But here again, we as Christians have failed to think as Biblical Christians and have adopted a basically pagan, anti-Christian concept of borders.

Borders in the Bible were not meant to restrain individuals or to give more power to the civil government to control the movement of individuals. Borders were actually establish to limit the power and the geographical extent of the civil government. We already saw that a fugitive slave could settle in Israel, protected from the laws of the land of his pagan master. In Israel, the local city governments were limited in extent; a man could flee to another city if he believed he wouldn’t get a fair treatment in the courts of his own city. Cities of refuge were established for those who have killed unintentionally, to protect them from the wrath of the victim’s relatives; the legal authority for prosecution was in the hands of the city of refuge, thus limiting the power of other civil governments (Numbers 35). The Biblical principle of borders was: Individuals can move freely, governments are restrained. The same principle protected the nation from foreign invaders: for a foreign invasion was a foreign government overstepping its boundaries. Few things reveal more clearly the foolishness of modern American Christianity than this inability to distinguish between immigration and invasion; and the difference is very clear, one is an act by individuals, and therefore is legitimate and allowed, and the other is an act of a government overstepping its boundaries.

Today, we have turned the Biblical concept of “boundary” on its head: We believe our government has the right to overstep any boundary, and we cheer for our government invading other nations and murdering civilians around the world; and we have supported laws that limit the freedom of individuals. And then we wonder why that same government oversteps its boundaries and limits our freedom. We have ourselves to blame, as Christians, as a church, and as conservatives. Liberals did not cause this to us, we did it ourselves, with our Biblical ignorance and our eager adoption of pagan, anti-Christian concepts and ideologies concerning civil government, borders, and immigration.

Much more can be said on this issue, for the issue of immigration is related to many other ethical issues in the Bible. It is related to economic growth; to monetary policies; to children and abortion; to education, etc. To cover it all we need a book, at least. And it may take many years before we shake off the false ideologies we have adopted in the last two decades concerning foreigners and immigration, and return back to a thoroughly Biblical, Christian, righteous view of the foreigner. And demand the Biblical solution to the immigration crisis: Get the government out of immigration, and protect the liberty of all, the homeborn and the stranger.

“Do not be forgetful,” the author of Hebrews says in 13:2, “to show love for strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it.” But we, the American church, have demanded from our government to legislate hatred to strangers, to take away their liberty and to deny them justice, asking for man’s laws over the Law of God.

“Depart from me, accursed ones,” Jesus will say in the Day of Judgment, “for I was a stranger, and you did not invite Me in” (Matt. 25:43). On this specific issue, as a church, we have been paying lip service to Christ, while at the same time we have demanded that our government kick the strangers out. And then we have been wondering why Jesus is not here to bless our efforts in turning America back. Could it be that He is not here because He has obeyed our immigration laws? Could it be that He is one of those deported strangers? You think Jesus would for sure be flying the stars and stripes today, and not present Himself as a stranger to test you? Could it be that we have sealed the fate of America by abandoning our true Christian heritage, buying wholesale the ideology of the enemy? Could it be that we have been hypocritically babbling about “evangelism” and “preaching the Gospel” and “missions,” and when God sends us people to evangelize, we have demanded that they be deported, or gunned down?

And could it be that the creeping totalitarianism in the US is largely due to our own blindness, in giving the civil government power over individuals that God never gave it?

We all know the story of the church in Germany situated by the railroad tracks used by the Nazis to ship Jews to the concentration camps. The church dutifully gathered every Sabbath to do their meaningless liturgies. When a train would pass and the human beings in that train screamed to get the attention of the church-goers, the church just sang their hymns louder to drown the screams. It wasn’t keeping the Sabbath. It was savagely violating the Sabbath while pretending to keep it. It was the moral equivalent of murdering a person while pretending to save them.

Pretty damning, isn’t it. And yet, if you think about it, they were motivated by fear. They did not oppose an evil pagan regime but at least, they did not actively collaborate. In a hostile, dangerous situation, it is understandable if a man loses heart and just passively lie down and wait.

Compare this to the American church today, where there is no danger if we speak out. We have not simply passively acquiesced with the evil laws of a pagan regime, we have actively rooted for those laws, and have demanded even more evil and anti-Christian policies. And then we expect God to be pleased with our own liturgies and Sunday pageants, in the face of our support of sending the slaves and the strangers of the world back to their concentration camps. We think we keep the Sabbath Law; but we have rejected what that same law tells us, “Remember, your parents were immigrants in this country, and came here from a land of oppression, to find liberty and justice for all.”

It is time to return to a true Biblical worldview, and a true Biblical view on immigration. And it is time for us Christians to dump the lies we have bought and demand that the civil government gets out of the immigration business altogether, and let people live. It is time for us as Christians to hear the commandment that “one law shall there be for everyone,” for the homeborn and the alien. We can’t afford to be driven by our fears, instilled in us by a gang of liberal politicians; we must strictly cling to the Law of God and its provisions. And never turn to the right or to the left.

Without that, we can’t hope to preserve Christendom, let alone restore it. And may God give us the grace to accept His Word, and obey it

September 18, 2013

The issue of the individual purpose of man first became important to my thinking and my theological interests many years ago when I read R.J. Rushdoony’s Revolt Against Maturity, especially his chapter on “What Is Man?” At the end of that chapter, Rushdoony says the following about the definition of man:

God’s definition of man in Jesus Christ means that man is recreated in God’s image by the atoning work of Jesus Christ and is given a specific task in history.

Progress is ensured and historical development opened up by means of God’s defining and redemptive act.

The unregenerate seek to end history; Marx’s ideal order is a static, unchanging realm, and the same is true of the dream-orders of anarchists and pragmatists. God’s creation and recreation inaugurate history: man is given an objective and a purpose. The world is to be subjected to man; for this goal to be realized, man must first subject himself to God.1

Rushdoony, of course, uses the word “man” in a general sense, applying it to mankind. But I was at the same time studying the concept of the Trinity, and, being immersed in the understanding of the equal ultimacy of the one and the many, it was impossible for me to not take this admonishment to have clear meaning for the individual man as well. Obviously, from a Trinitarian perspective, for the covenant man to have a specific task in history, the individual man had to have been given such a task. And for the covenant man to have an objective and purpose, to have the world subjected to him, the individual man had to have his own individual objective and purpose. It was not enough to speak generally about the task and purpose of mankind in general; a missionary and a preacher had to speak specifically about the task and purpose of every individual man in the plan of God and in the fulfillment of the Great Commission.

Making the first steps of homeschooling our children in an environment hostile both to our faith and to homeschooling, my wife and I were from the very beginning convinced that our homeschooling would make no sense unless we teach our children to seek and find their specific task and purpose as individuals, in the plan of God. Not just as members of our family, and not just as members of a church, or of a community. We had a very clear postmillennial/theonomic vision not only for the communities they would be a part of, but also for their life: “You know, son, the Bible starts with a Garden where precious stones and gold are scattered around; and it ends with a City where those stones and that gold are built into walls and streets. Your life must be devoted to finding that

specific corner of the Garden that belongs to you, and leave it built up and operating for the glory of God when you leave this earth. Your job is to capitalize—that is, make useful and productive—a portion of God’s creation. You’ll have to find out which part of it is yours.” It was a no-brainer for

us that children need to be given their own direction and purpose. We wouldn’t even think anyone who understood the Dominion Mandate and the Great Commission would have any other idea about the purpose of the individual and the goals of their Christian education.

The issue came powerfully back to me a few weeks ago when a story about the testimony of the daughter of a Christian apologist hit the Internet. The girl had been trained in apologetics and theology by her father in a very systematic and thorough way; she knew all her verses, she knew all her logical responses to objections. And yet, she testifies, she revolted against her parents’ faith. The supposed reason was that she suddenly discovered a question about the Bible that no Christian— including her father—had an answer to. The question was rather stupid, and the claim that there was no answer to it doubly so. There was an answer. But the main issue was, as far as I was concerned, why would an intelligent girl use such ridiculous pretext as an excuse to reject her parents’ faith? I knew why. In the description she gave of her upbringing, one thing was missing from that rigorous training program in apologetics her father gave her: He didn’t teach her to find her personal place in Kingdom, her own area of the Garden that she was supposed to build into a city. She was trained to defend her faith, or rather, the faith of her parents. She was not trained to advance the Kingdom as an individual with her own purpose and place and area to conquer.

Then a friend of mine called me to ask advice about some issues with raising his children. The specific issue was their desire to play sports on Sunday afternoon. His view of the Sabbath, I gathered, was a bit stricter than mine. I am not as strict Sabattarian as many of my Reformed friends are, but one thing caught my attention in his description: The children’s expectation that they would become professional players, and that would be their way of glorifying God. Even if I ignored my personal suspicions concerning such a way of glorifying God, the conclusion was still obvious: the children had a very clear vision for their future, which vision, though, couldn’t have come from their father’s specific training and influence. My own children have played sports, played different musical instruments, played in the local orchestra, all ostensibly glorious things that tempt a person to feel important and satisfied with his own performance and victories, but not for a single moment have I seen my children succumb to the temptation to believe that these visibly attractive moments of glory point to a future of professional sports, or professional music. My suspicion was that my friend didn’t teach them individual purpose, and the children had discovered one outside the scope of his teaching. My suspicion was correct. He didn’t. He taught them the ethical boundaries of the Gospel; but his teaching lacked the ethical direction and purpose of the Gospel as applied to their own life.

The problem is not limited to these two cases. Even among conscientious, professing, covenantal, theonomic, homeschooling Christians I see the same pattern: children are taught ethical boundaries as the highest expression of their faith. They are not taught purpose, direction, meaning of life, goals for the future, as applied to their individual life. Even where purpose is taught and preached, it is mainly collective, as applied to the family and the church. But individual purpose of man under God is lacking.

The Biblical analysis of the problem must start from an analysis of the very nature of the Kingdom of God, as revealed to us in both Old Testament prophecies and in New Testament parables.

Contrary to the beliefs of many modern church-goers, individual salvation is not the ultimate reality

in the New Testament, and it is not the main message of the Gospel. Individual salvation is only a tool for the Gospel, not its purpose, goal, or objective. The Gospel is much larger than the salvation of individual souls, and its greatness encompasses the whole world. In 1 Cor. 15 Paul gives us a description of the Gospel, and he continues it until he says that “all things will be subjected” to Jesus, so that at the end, “God may be all in all.” “All things being subjected to Jesus” here is that reality which the Bible calls the “Kingdom of God” or the “Kingdom of heaven.” It is this Kingdom that is the purpose and goal of the Gospel. The Gospel is called the Gospel of the Kingdom, and, judging from the Great Commission and from 1 Cor. 15:24-28, the Gospel therefore encompasses all reality, and addresses all reality with this great vision, the rule of Christ over all things. Salvation of the world is the ultimate goal, with individual salvation being only a means to that end (John 3:16- 17); and that salvation of the world can come only through establishing the royal power of Jesus Christ over all the earth. Thus an analysis of the nature of that Kingdom is necessary before we can fully understand the problem and its solution.

Such analysis will show us the most striking characteristic of the Kingdom of God: its aggressive growth. Both the Old Testament prophecies and the New Testament parables of the Kingdom reveal a reality that is expanding, increasing, growing, taking all the space available, and consuming its rivals until it rules the whole world. There is nothing like the modern pacifist and passive view of the Kingdom where the Kingdom is a closed, besieged entity defended against the surrounding forces of evil. There is nothing like the modern reductionist idea where certain areas of life and culture are out of reach for the Gospel because they are by their nature part of the enemy’s realm. The Kingdom is shown to be advancing and increasing, and that after the First Coming of Christ, in history, not after the end of history.

Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, revealed and interpreted by Daniel (Daniel 2), shows the Kingdom of Christ coming “in the days” of the kings of the old kingdoms, right after the Roman Empire. The Kingdom is described in the dream as a “stone cut out without hands.” That stone “struck the statue” of the human kingdoms and crushed it, and then “became a mountain and filled the whole earth.” Before Daniel, Isaiah prophesied about the coming Messiah-King, that after His birth as a child and a Son, “Of the increase of His government and peace there shall be no end.” In fact, the whole passage (Is. 9:1-7) sounds like a battle song, promising God’s active and aggressive involvement in the war against His enemies. Given the fact that from v. 6 we know exactly the time prophesied in the passage, this is all a prophesy about the coming Messianic kingdom, established with the earthly ministry of Christ. There are many other prophesies in the Old Testament that speak about God’s aggressive involvement in history to defeat His enemies, especially the most quoted Old Testament passage in the New Testament, Ps. 110. The promise of ruling the nations with a rod of iron, and the warning to the kings of the earth in Ps. 2 is another example. They all, of course, follow the prophesy-promise in Gen. 3:15 about the coming Redeemer. God is not in the business of simply saving a few souls from what is supposedly a largely unpredictable and uncontrollable historical process; He promised before the Incarnation that it would unleash an era of conquest, or rather, a re- conquest, and the coming of the restoration of God’s kingdom among mankind.

The New Testament is not timid about the expanding Kingdom either. Jesus’s parables unmistakably give us a picture of a growing entity in history before the Second Coming, whether in the parable of the mustard tree or the leaven in the flour. To the Jewish leaders He said that they would see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven (a picture of invasion and aggression, see Is. 19:1), and the timing of it was “from now on,” that is, from the very moment Jesus spoke to them. The Great

Commission starts with the declaration of Christ’s total authority over the earth. Paul says the civil government must be God’s servant (Rom. 13), contrary to the statist ideology of Rome; he also says that all things belong to the Christians, including the world and the future (1 Cor. 3:21). It is the declaration that Jesus is King that earned the Christians their persecutions (Acts 17:7), not the declaration of Jesus as a personal Savior, which was actually received rather favorably by the authorities at the time (Acts 26). Jesus gave evidence of the presence of the Kingdom, and that was the work of driving out demons (Matt. 12:28; Luke 11:20), an aggressive assault on what was previously considered territory preserved for the realm of Satan. He also described the Church as pushing aggressively against the gates of hell (Matt. 16:18). Paul’s military language in 2 Cor. 10:3- 6 shows an aggressive agenda of “tearing down fortresses,” “taking captive,” “destroying speculations,” and “punishing disobedience.” His sermon in Athens ended not with an altar call of passive expectation for someone’s conscience to be moved but with the verb παραγγέλλω, a military term meaning “charge, give orders, command.”

The picture is very clear: in this world, in history, the Kingdom of God starts from a small seed, Jesus Christ Himself. It grows aggressively throughout history—His Kingdom and peace increase without end—until it fills the whole world, just like the stone in Daniel 2, and the leaven and the mustard tree in Matt. 13. It takes over the spiritual realm of Satan, but it also conquers the minds of men, and through them, their civilization, politically, economically, socially, etc. No church “ghettos” are envisioned in the Bible, no passive expectations of the coming of Christ, no desperate spiritual defense to preserve one’s faith or church against the superior forces of the enemy besieging the church. An aggressive army of an advancing Kingdom, winning cultural victories for her King, is what history after the Incarnation is all about.

So far so good. This vision of the Kingdom and the Church is being accepted by a growing number of Christians today, especially young families. The understanding that the defeatism and the eschatological pessimism of the previous generations have brought us cultural defeat and decline is growing, and there is a change in the very theological climate in the church.

What hasn’t been growing, though, is the understanding that this new—in fact, well-forgotten old— vision of the Kingdom must produce a new type of man, just as every ideology and every doctrine produces its own type of man. The pessimistic eschatologies dominant in the last century have produced a type of man that is basically passive to the assault of the prevailing culture. This has either driven Christians to generally acquiesce with the non-Christian culture or to withdraw from influencing it, into Christian ghettos. The churches have been reduced to distributing altar calls and passively registering the growing evil in the world—wherever, of course, they haven’t been actively collaborating with it in the first place. While such mentality is natural to premillennialism and amillennialism with their view of the power of evil vs. the power of the Kingdom of God, the majority of those who have adopted an optimistic, victorious eschatology, are still under the spell of this old mentality.

The mentality produced by the Gospel of the Kingdom of God can be best described with the words of Jesus in Matt. 11:12:

From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force.

John Calvin comments on this verse:

The meaning therefore is, A vast assembly of men is now collected, as if men were rushing violently forward to seize the kingdom of God; for, aroused by the voice of one man, they come together in crowds, and receive, not only with eagerness, but with vehement impetuosity, the grace which is offered to them. Although very many are asleep, and are no more affected than if John in the wilderness were acting a play which had no reference to them, yet many flock to him with ardent zeal.

Matthew Henry calls it, “like the violence of an army taking a city by storm, or of a crowd bursting into a house, so the violent take it by force.”

The verse is very interesting in that it uses the word “violent” twice: to describe the manner of “taking the kingdom,” and to describe the nature of men who are taking it. Not just the manner of taking the Kingdom is aggressive; the men who are taking the Kingdom also have that quality of aggressive, uncompromising “vehement impetuosity,” of men who, compared to the others around them, look like “violent” men. Men who have a goal and purpose in life, and who don’t wait passively for things to happen. Men who bring about change in their own life and in the world around them, and are not satisfied with seeing things remain the same, day after day, year after year.

As described by the pietism and misplaced pacifism of modern churches, the image of a good Christian is one who has things happening to him—especially persecutions. While persecutions are characteristic to the life of a Christian, they do not come to people who passively wait for things to happen, or who let the world around them run its course unchallenged and unchanged. The heroes of the faith in Hebrews 11 are indeed described as men and women who went through persecutions (vv. 35-38). But these persecutions were not for idly and passively waiting for things to happen. They were the consequence of the same aggressive, warrior spirit which Jesus described as “violent.” These same heroes of the faith also “conquered kingdoms, dispensed justice, became mighty in war, put armies to flight,” etc., etc. (vv. 33-34). Persecutions do not come to those who are content to leave things as they are; the enemy reacts violently only to those who violently threaten his realm.

This aggressiveness of spirit is such an important property of the character of a believer that when Moses appealed to his own inability and lack of aggressiveness in speech, “the anger of the Lord burnt against” him (Ex. 4:10-14). Joshua and Caleb were commended by God for their aggressiveness in wanting to enter the land and take possession of it, while the rest of Israel wanted to go back to the old state of things, Egypt. Gideon was addressed by the angel of the Lord as “valiant warrior,” and when Gideon told him how discontent and angry he was at the way things were in Israel, the angel replied, “Go in this your strength and deliver Israel” (Judges 6:14). The examples are too many for all to be mentioned in one article.

Given all that, it is rather inexplicable why even families who should know better, confine the education and spiritual training of their children to building ethical fences around them. Ethical boundaries are important; there is no doubt about it. Without ethical boundaries established by the Law of God man is left to his own devices, which most certainly produce death; spiritual, cultural, economic, etc. Without ethical boundaries dominion degenerates into tyranny, courage into recklessness, entrepreneurship into greed, leadership into exploitation. There are certain actions that sit outside the sphere of legitimate activities of man and the ethical boundaries which determine that sphere. Aggressiveness, that “violent” spirit Jesus speaks of, must be channeled according to God’s limitations and stipulations; it cannot be determined by the autonomous will of man.

And yet, in themselves, ethical boundaries are not enough to get one into the Kingdom of God, nor enough to “seize” the Kingdom of God. The Great Commission doesn’t read, “teaching them to not do anything of what I have forbidden you to do.” Instead, it presents a positive statement of active obedience, not of passive refraining from action. Jesus Himself, when speaking of “violent men” who are taking the Kingdom “by force,” contrasts that new era of the aggressively expanding Kingdom to the old era where the Law and the Prophets were the defining factor (Matt. 11:13; Luke 16:16). He is not contrasting the Law to the Gospel as some theologians today ignorantly claim; not at all, or His Sermon on the Mount wouldn’t make any sense (Mat. 5:17-19), and nor would Paul’s declaration that the legal foundation of the civil applications of the Law is the Gospel (1 Tim. 1:8- 11). Jesus here is contrasting ruling principles of motivation: the passive obedience of ethical boundaries vs. the active obedience of violently taking the Kingdom. It is not enough anymore to just preserve oneself from committing a major sin; this won’t get one in the Kingdom. When a scribe acknowledged to Jesus that ethical obedience to the Law is much more important than liturgical participation, Jesus still did not say the scribe was in the Kingdom, He just said he was “not far from the Kingdom” (Mark 12:28-34). (The often-missed context of these verses is that “God is God of the living, not of the dead,” v. 27.) Teaching believers, or teaching children just to avoid sin, or just to defend their faith against attacks, can bring them close to the Kingdom, but not into it.

There must be something more. Something that agrees with that “violent” spirit of those who take the Kingdom “by force.”

Then again, there are those who, led by pietistic considerations, believe that that “violence” has to do with striving for the simple acts of repentance and profession of faith and the individual salvation the believer receives from God. And then, of course, with the “aggressive” evangelism of preaching that same individual salvation to others, so that they perform the same acts of repentance and profession of faith and get saved.

But this, again, is rather defensive; it is an escape from death and perdition, from the realm of Satan and the curse. It is a legitimate and necessary step for those who have been redeemed by God. But in itself, this step is still self-centered and passive; it doesn’t not have a Kingdom in mind beyond the scope of the individual needs of the believer. It may produce some changes in the individual life of the person, and in his eternal state, but it doesn’t necessarily produce changes in the world around him, in history, in his own generation. The author of Hebrews explicitly says that such repentance and profession of faith and conversion are just “elementary things,” “baby food,” and that the mature believer should “press on to maturity” (Heb. 5:11-6:2).

Therefore, there must be something more. Simple ethical boundaries, or simple conversion and evangelism, are not what defines the “violent” spirit of the men who take the Kingdom by force. What is it that “takes the Kingdom by force”?

The answer must come from the larger reality of the Covenant of God. And I mean, the Covenant of God that He made with mankind at the Creation. It is often called by theologians today the Covenant of Works (although I personally prefer if the name was changed to Covenant of Work). But a better name, that characterizes it best, is Dominion Covenant, or Dominion Mandate. Man was created in the Image of God, and the mistake many theologians today make is that that Image of God denotes something man is, ontologically, in his passive being. Thus attempts have been made to find that image of God in something man has or is, like his intellect, his ability, or anything else that pertains to man’s being. But the first chapter of Genesis defines the image of God as represented in man’s purpose of dominion over the created world. It is not found so much in man’s “being” as in his “doing,” in what he was created to do and to achieve.

With man created to take dominion over creation, the original Covenant of God, the large framework of all successive covenants, was that Dominion Mandate. It was the original aggressive mandate, to take the order and abundance of the Garden and expand it throughout the world. It was the purpose and direction, the “violence” that was from the beginning supposed to characterize man as a creature in God’s image. Violence, of course, not against his fellow man, but “violence” against the disorder and the formlessness and the fruitlessness of a world that didn’t have a steward, a legitimate master under God. Man was supposed to actively increase his dominion over the world and change nature into something better; he was supposed to capitalize it, to bring order to it, to transform it, and to construct it into a civilization.

This image of God, this task, was not destroyed nor annulled in the Fall. It certainly became harder, for man now has to do everything without God’s starting point, the Garden. “You want to be gods, create your own starting point,” was God’s reply to their sin. But man was still defined by God’s image, and therefore he was still under the obligation to take dominion and civilize the world. Sin could not destroy that purpose in man, for the image of God can be twisted but never destroyed.

From the very first generations after Adam and Eve mankind began building a civilization—a civilization marred by sin and wickedness, of course, but a civilization nevertheless.

Jesus’s death and resurrection restored man to that original purpose. “All authority has been given to me” couldn’t mean anything else but that the earth was now legally restored to the descendants of the Second Adam, to fulfill their Dominion Mandate. In case that wasn’t clear, Paul told the Corinthians, “All thing belong to you,” including the world (1 Cor. 3:21-22). Abraham’s promise was interpreted in the New Testament not as inheritance of a small strip of land in the Middle East but as “the heir of the world” (Rom. 4:13).

And the redeemed humanity now had work to do, for Paul told them that “the whole creation groans,” waiting for us to be revealed as the sons of God, as being in God’s image, so that the creation itself can be freed from the bondage of corruption (Rom. 8:19-22).

Thus the active element in man’s purpose under God, the essence of that “violence” Jesus is speaking about, is . . . work. Work, that is, applying man’s labor to creation to change it from subject to corruption to proclaiming the glory of God. Rushdoony says that “work is the connecting link in the activities of man in the states of innocence, the fall, grace, and glory.” The goal of man’s work, he continues, “was the fulfillment of the Kingdom of God on earth, putting God’s rule and word into effective government through man in every realm of life.” And then, speaking of the state of grace of man, he says:

In the state of grace, the redemptive work of Christ restores man to his calling, to his work. To the extent that the individual is sanctified, and to the extent that his area and place of work are redeemed ground and in process of being sanctified, to that extent the curse is removed from his work, and to that extent in work, en ergos, he can manifest, as the image of God, the energy of God’s image- bearer at work. The more clearly redeemed and sanctified the man and the ground he stands upon, the more energetic his work, and the more successful his capitalization under God.

And the conclusion he draws for the state of grace:

True work is the religious energy of a society in action, remaking all things in terms of God’s Kingdom, and developing the potentiality of all things in terms of His calling. The redeemed man is a working man.2

Thus the redeemed man is not characterized by his ability to successfully avoid sin; a dead body can achieve the same thing, and still have no life nor aggressiveness in it. A redeemed man is characterized by his productivity, by his ability to transform the created world according to God’s purposes. It is not a mere coincidence that Proverbs, the Book of Wisdom, ends with the description of a woman who is economically productive, and not only economically productive, but also aggressive in her economic actions. Wisdom that constitutes only ethical boundaries but does not lead to economic productivity is the “wisdom” of a dead body.

Indeed, it is important to realize that the virtuous woman in Proverbs 31 is not just a description of a good wife, she is a prescription for the church as a whole, and for every one of us as individual members of the church. In the context of the “violence” Jesus was speaking about, we can’t help but notice v. 25 of that chapter:

Strength and dignity [majesty] are her clothing, and she smiles at the future.

The woman described here has a purpose for her life, an individual purpose that is only hers and no one else’s. She is not described as a passive participant in a collective; not even her family is described as a collective where she participates in some collective actions. Under some well- meaning but misplaced views of the family and the relationships within the family, some modern commentators are trying to present her as acting under the constant direction and supervision of her husband, as his errand boy or servant. But the text describes an independently-minded, self- motivated woman on a mission, an individual, personal, actively and aggressively pursued mission within a covenantal framework, not just simple obedience to someone else’s commands.

And what is that mission? Economic productivity.

This very principle must set the goal for our children’s education: Our children must be self- consciously, aggressively, uncompromisingly taught to find their specific, personal, individual corner of the marketplace, where they will be economically productive, and where “their gain will be good.”

This must be the constantly present topic of our family devotions: That our children need to look to the future in terms of their professional development. Teaching them the ethical boundaries of the Law of God and the intellectual defense of the faith is important, no doubt about that, for not knowing the ethical framework of the Kingdom a person can be easily misled to start building his own kingdom. But the active, aggressive element of their spiritual training and instruction cannot be those ethical boundaries and intellectual defenses. This element must be their understanding that there is a place for them in the world where they can transform previously void and formless earth into an ordered structure which renders glory to God and service to men. They need an individual purpose for their lives, not just their place in the family of their parents. When a man leaves his father and mother (Gen. 2:24), he must be spiritually, ethically, emotionally, but also professionally prepared to be on his own and take dominion as an independent man.

The family—before the church—is supposed to be the training ground, the equipping center for the saints to go out and conquer the world for Christ. It must instill in the children a sense of personal, individual purpose, and the aggressiveness of pursuing that purpose. It must give the children the emotional fuel to continue studying and preparing themselves for a life of independence and economic productivity, even when there are no immediate results. Too often today we encourage our children to go into vocations that are glossy and glorious on the surface but require little investment in academic studies—small business, technical jobs, movie-making, arts, etc. But the real culture- changers are those fields of employment and business that require long-term effort of academic and professional training: engineering, the medical profession, science and technologies, organization of labor and production, industrial design, law, banking, etc. They don’t look glossy and glorious and attractive and fun, but it is these areas of productivity that leave the deepest influence on the culture. Whoever serves, leads, says Jesus (Matt. 23:11-12), and the best way to serve your fellow human beings is to invest in years of accumulating knowledge about how the world operates and use it for building a civilization from the scattered resources God placed in your corner.

This professional and academic training is what will give our children the aggressiveness to expand the Kingdom of Christ. It is dominion through service. And our children must be taught to devote their individual lives to the study and work that God has for them. First learn to identify the specific purpose for them individually, and then spend the effort and the energy to pursue it. This part of their training and education is just as important as teaching them to belong to a family or to a church. In fact, if we train them collectivistically, to surrender their individual calling to an institution—even a God-ordained institution as the family or the church—we may succeed in destroying their spirit, and may eventually lose them. Granted, their gifts must be exercised in a covenantal framework, but ‘covenantal framework’ is not the same as ‘institutional subjection’. The Dominion Mandate and the Great Commission are fulfilled not by collectives but by individuals trained by their families and their churches.

This also means that while we as parents need to find the Biblically ethical way of training our children for their future professional successes, we can’t afford to build walls around them that would stop them from exploring and pursuing their gifts to the maximum. While as Christian homeschoolers we need to keep our children at home during the time they are in the stage of maturing spiritually and intellectually, we can’t afford to keep them on the same level when they reach the age of maturity and must grow in their academic and professional pursuits. While a Christian college (for academic, or engineering, or medical, or legal education), or a Christian company (for business, or technical apprenticeship), is preferable to non-Christian colleges and

companies, it is still important to understand that in the age of maturity some training is better than no training at all. We can’t trust the non-Christian teachers in the public schools to train and instruct our children in the Lord. But we can trust our already trained and instructed young men and women to survive in a hostile environment, if the prize is the ability to pursue their economic calling before God, under His Dominion Mandate.

The battle for the hearts of our children will not be fought in the area of ethical boundaries, nor in the area of evangelism and apologetic defense of the faith. The battle will be fought in the area of personal, individual purpose for each one of our children. It is this individual purpose that will give them the aggressiveness, the “violent” characteristic of their faith that Jesus was talking about. It is work, the actions that transform a void and formless mess into an ordered, capitalized, useful and usable civilization, that characterize a redeemed man.

Our children need to know that there is a place, a corner of the Garden, for each one of them individually, no matter what their family connections are, and no matter what their church connections are. Church and family must stand only as a covenantal framework, not as an institutional master over them; these two institutions must be there to provide training and equipping, ethically and professionally; and provide that training to men and women as individuals, not as cogs in a collectivist machine. Our family devotions must focus on each one of them as an individual under God, and on finding their individual purpose under God.

Without that individual purpose, and without that understanding that the Dominion Mandate—and the Great Commission as the restoration of that Dominion Mandate—was given not only to mankind as a whole but also to every individual person under God, we will lose the hearts of our children.

They will naturally tend to find such individual purpose somewhere else, if they don’t find it through the family or through the church. True enough, in many cases the family will provide that purpose— and many sons have continued the business or the ministry of their fathers; but it must still be in the context of individual purpose, not of de-personalizing the individual for the goals of an institution.

To end with the words of R.J. Rushdoony:

God’s creation and recreation inaugurate history: man is given an objective and a purpose. The world is to be subjected to man; for this goal to be realized, man must first subject himself to God.

And as parents, we need to always remember the flip side of this: If our children do not have their individual objective and purpose, to have part of the world subjected to them individually, there will be little motivation for them to subject themselves to God, individually.

R. J. Rushdoony, Revolt Against Maturity: A Biblical Psychology of Man (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, [1977] 1987), p. 146. [D]

R. J. Rushdoony, Revolt Against Maturity, pp. 298-302. [D]

It wasn’t until very recently that some Presbyterians in the US started re-discovering their rich history of involvement in the formation and the founding of America, as we know her today—or as is the common perception of what she was supposed to be, originally. That rich history of Presbyterian initiative, involvement, and leadership in the political and judicial battles for liberty and justice in America has been hidden beneath several generations of government education of millions of American schoolchildren, and those Presbyterians who have cut their addiction to government schools have begun to actually study history and discover the historical truth about Presbyterianism.

The process of discovery of that truth has been both glorious and painful. Glorious, because we have been learning that Presbyterianism has been a much weightier factor in the formation and the founding of the United States as a nation, polity, economic and intellectual community, etc. than we ever thought. We have been discovering things like the real reasons for the Revolution: the sermons of Presbyterian pastors in the three decades before 1775. We have learned the unofficial name given the American Revolution by King George—the Presbyterian Rebellion; or the words of Horace Walpole’s announcement of the beginning of the hostilities, “Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian parson.” In the first one hundred years of the existence of the United States, Presbyterianism—both as a church culture and as a theological system—was the major factor of forming the business and intellectual world of the young Republic. For better or for worse, Presbyterians were disproportionally over-represented on both sides of the War Between the States, and their theological systems were used on both sides for justification of political causes. Presbyterian ministers were among the leading voices against corruption and police brutality into the early decades of the 20th century. In the international arena, American Presbyterian missions—together with their British brethren—were shaping America’s foreign policy much more ably and successfully than her State Department: whether in China, or in India, or in the Ottoman Empire, or in Africa, Presbyterian missionaries exercised cultural influence far above their small numbers on the field, and by this, they were the true representatives of Christian America and therefore America in general. Presbyterian churches gave America many business and political leaders, and for a while the cultural war between conservatism and liberalism was only a broader reflection of theological conflicts within Presbyterian circles. It won’t be too much of an overstatement if one said that America was founded as a Presbyterian culture, and that influence was felt for several generations after the Revolution.

Discovering these historical facts and truths, however, has been as painful as it has been glorious. For in learning about the state and the cultural dominance of Presbyterianism in the founding of the United States, we can’t help but compare it to the present state and cultural presence of Presbyterianism. No need to even elaborate on it, the facts are clear before our eyes, and they are not in favor of modern Presbyterianism. If there has ever been an example of salt thrown out and trampled by men, it is Presbyterianism in the US. Clearly, at some point, it lost its savor, and the realization of this is painful to those of us who know what its savor was before. But on the bright side, it forces us to think about an answer to the question: “What happened to make American Presbyterianism lose its savor?”

The answer given by many conservative Presbyterian ministers today always throws the blame on something else but these same ministers. It’s the world that is a “fallen world”; or it is that history is never predictable by man, and therefore whatever has happened or is happening is part of God’s inscrutable will, there’s nothing we can do about it; or it’s entertainment that makes people unwilling to listen to long boring sermons on irrelevant topics; etc., etc. The answer that the Bible gives, though, is that it’s the church leadership that bears the primary responsibility, and therefore we should be looking for the reasons for the decline in the very leadership, and in their teaching and practices.

I am far from the idea that there is only one main factor. There are many factors that led to that loss of savor, which relegated modern Presbyterianism to the periphery of the American society. The abandonment of theonomy left Presbyterianism unable to speak on issues of justice and righteousness in the society. The abandonment of covenant theology left it unable to build a consistent view of history that would give its adherents the ability to discern the times. The abandonment of postmillennialism deprived it of hope for the future in history, thus rendering any cultural endeavors hopeless, or superfluous, at best. Cessationism, and the abandonment of the Charismatic views—as well as the condemnation of the Charismatic practices—of the Presbyterians before the 1850s (when the rationalism of the Enlightenment became the ruling intellectual paradigm in Presbyterianism) destroyed the concept of spiritual leadership, leaving the movement entirely dependent on bureaucratic management; thus giving us one of the clearest practical examples of Max Weber’s “routinization of charisma.” All these together contributed to the decline of Presbyterianism from its pinnacle of cultural dominance and influence to the periphery of the American culture, and that in the course of a little over a generation.

Plus one more factor. A factor that no one talks about, perhaps because most ministers and ordinary believers are not aware of it. In fact, almost any Presbyterian elder in the US you ask about it, will reply that of all characteristics of original Presbyterianism, this one has never been abandoned and is still at work in the Presbyterian churches today: The Plurality of Elders. But the reality is different. And my thesis in this article is that, contrary to the common perception, the principle of plurality of elders has not only been abandoned in modern Presbyterianism, it has been actively destroyed theologically, legislatively, and in practice. Only an empty shell of it has remained. This destruction of this principle has contributed to the demise of Presbyterianism as much as any of the other factors mentioned above.

The principle of plurality of elders is simple: No local church is to be governed by one person only, and no local church is to be without government, or have its government so identical with the congregation itself as to be practically without a government. The tyranny of the democratic mob is rejected: A church has to have a government of elders that is a distinct body, capable of making authoritative decisions about the affairs of the church, and capable of blocking initiatives of the congregation which are found to be harmful to the church or to individual church members. The tyranny of authoritarian rule is also rejected: no man should be allowed to have so much authority as to never be accountable to any other man in the congregation. There is no “divine right” in the government of the church, and therefore any measure of authority over men must be balanced with an equal measure of accountability and responsibility before men. So the church must be ruled by a body of elders, traditionally called a session. In the session, every elder has—or is supposed to have—equal authority to every other elder, and also equal authority to any combination of other elders. But the principle doesn’t stop there. The session itself must be accountable as a body: either to a greater body of the sessions of several churches, called a “presbytery” (in Presbyterianism) or to the congregation as a body distinct from the session (Congregationalism).

A more detailed study into the Biblical foundation for the principle of plurality of elders is beyond the scope of this article, and is not necessary. The principle is not something new to be defended, it has been the very foundation of Presbyterian church polity for 400 years. It has been acknowledged as a valid Biblical principle even among those churches in the Reformed family who are formally Episcopalian or Congregational in their organization, as well as by most Reformed Baptist churches. It’s commonly acknowledged among Reformed Christians that concentrating power in the hands of one individual or institution is ultimately a claim to divinity, as the history of the Church of Rome clearly demonstrates. Thus, a local church body must be governed by a plurality of elders, so that no single person has such control over that body that to be above any personal or institutional accountability for his actions and decisions.

It is this Presbyterian polity, as was developed in the 18th century, that became the practical example for several generation of Americans in the realm of politics and civil government. While in theory many of the Founding Fathers looked to Greece and Rome for inspiration for their republican principles, in practice the majority of the population in the colonies learned republican principles in their churches, from their church ministers, and practiced them in their local congregations. Thus, even though the vast majority of modern Presbyterians are either ignorant of their own history or are antinomian, flatly rejecting the relation between the beliefs and practices in the church and the political and social structure of the nation, the Presbyterian principle of plurality of elders played an important role in the formation of the American political system, and will play a major role in the modern resistance to political tyranny and socialism in the future.

As good and beneficial the principle of Plurality of Elders is, it can be abused—as can any other good and beneficial principle of government. Some principles of government, admitted, are deficient by their very nature; but more often, a principle of government gets abused because the majority of those who claim to abide by it have lost their knowledge and understanding of the real meaning and purpose of the principle. This ignorance and lack of understanding are then used by crafty politicians—in this case, church politicians—who find ways to institute an external legal form of the principle while at the same time destroying its internal ethical meaning and purpose.

What should be obvious about the principle of Plurality of Elders is that in order for the principle to be operational, it requires several conditions to be present:

First, it requires that the session is not equated to nor confused with the local church. When theoretically, legally, and practically, the session of a church is considered as the church itself, the congregation becomes no more than simply customers of the session who have no say in the government of the church. In that case, the very concept of abuse of power is ruled out: for abuse of power presupposes certain rights for the abused person, and those who are simply customers of an organization have no rights in it except for the choice between staying and taking their “business” elsewhere. Mutual checks and balances between the elders, then, become superfluous when it comes to abuse of power: for the only legitimately defined conflict is not between those who rule and those who are ruled, but only in between the rulers themselves.

If the church as a body is legally differentiated from the session as a body, and if the church is the primary and foundational institution of the Christian faith, this will mean that the session as a body will have to be under certain rules of accountability in respect to the local church itself. Otherwise, if the session is not accountable to the church, then the session is the real fundamental institution, and the church is only an auxiliary, providing human material for the session to govern. After all, the pretended function of a session is to “minister” or to “serve,” and a servant must always be accountable to the one whom he serves. A session can’t be free from accountability to the church to which it ministers, and its accountability must include the whole array of sanctions a church body may legitimately administer, including excommunication—in this case, excommunication of the session itself. Without such accountability, no internal checks and balances within the session can have any meaning, for an elder who decides to exercise his right to checks and balances will have no institutional grounds to make his opposition effective.

To make it simple: the accountability and liability of a session must match the privilege and power of a session. If a session has executive privilege over the church as a collective, it must also be under executive accountability as a collective. There must be legal rules for starting a lawsuit against a session, and there must be legal rules for excommunicating a session for its decisions, if they are found to be detrimental to the church. Without such balance between privilege and liability, there are no real checks and balances, and there is no protection against abuse.

Second, the elders must be all independent individuals of individual gifting and calling, heavily invested in their own individual callings under God, and less invested in the session itself as a collective. An elder whose authority rests entirely on his official position as an elder and not on any gifts or ministry he has to the church independent of his church office, will be too weak to oppose the session in its majority. Paul opposed no less influential apostle than Peter plus “the rest of the Jews” (Gal. 2:11-21), in their mistreatment of the Gentile believers; one individual stood in opposition to the whole congregation, including to his own co-worker Barnabas (v. 13), sharply rebuking Peter “in the presence of all.” (Obviously, rebuking men of authority is not subject to the order in Matt. 18:15-18.) Paul’s courage to stand alone against the majority of the elders in the church obviously came from the authority of his special ministry in the church, as related in the first half of the same chapter in Galatians. A man of a lesser ministry or of an average position in the church would lack the weight to stand before Peter himself and rebuke him in the presence of all. For the principle of checks and balances to work, the elders must all be independent of the session as far as their authority is concerned. This, of course, is not to mean that a man without a recognizable church ministry should be considered less than a man with one; the issue here is in the wisdom of placing such men in a position of legal power when they lack real authority.

It is, indeed, a modern belief that ordination confers authority. The truth is, it doesn’t. It only grants legal power to the ordained person; or, if we want to call it “authority,” it would be in a very restricted sense of the word. Real authority—the ability to lead, to influence men and their decisions, to give a vision and a purpose to people and organizations—doesn’t come from a ceremony but from the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit, as is obvious from multiple examples in Scripture, seldom honors human ceremonies and bestows authority very often in opposition to them. We have all seen the type of “elders” in Presbyterian churches (and not only Presbyterian) who technically meet the minimum requirements of 1 Tim. 3 and Titus 1, but are mediocre in respect to their place and ministry in the church. We have also seen men of real authority who are a source of leadership and inspiration for many in the churches, who have no formal legal power in the church. Between the two groups, it is those with real authority who move the church—and defend it against tyrannical elders—not those with purely legal power without authority. Those whose position rests only on legal power become the perfect bureaucrats: stagnant and compliant with the majority, but never active and leading others to expand the Kingdom of God.

It is for this reason that Paul legitimized his ministry not by the initial ordination he received in Antioch but by the obvious gift he had as an apostle of Christ, and the powerful works he did through the Holy Spirit. And when he advised Timothy, he admonished him to use and rekindle the gift given to him by prophecy (1 Tim. 4:14; 2 Tim. 1:6): obviously, Timothy’s real authority was based not on the mere ritual of being laid hands on but on the gift and on the prophecy. Without such real authority, no man can stand his ground alone against the majority, as Paul stood up to Peter and to the Council at Jerusalem.

Third, the session must be banned from making decisions by simple majority in all cases. Or, more precisely, individual veto must be incorporated in its rules, as well as legal immunity as protection for a dissenting elder against revenge by the majority. In other words, a dissenting elder must have the legal power to block a session’s decision in cases where it is needed for the protection of Christian liberty and for blocking tyranny in the church. Just as in St. Augustine’s description of the Trinity, no Person is greater than another, and no two Persons are together greater than the third,1 a session must not be allowed to make a combination of elders greater than a single elder in the decisions of the session.

It is a modern misconception in the Presbyterian churches that plurality of elders means decisions by majority. This is the heresy of democracy, it is not plurality of elders. In the Bible, in almost all cases, decisions by majority were the wrong decisions, and God has always worked through minorities, or most often through individual dissenters against the crowd. Based on Biblical example, odds are that even among the covenant people, the majority decision is wrong. And it is only to be expected given the fact that especially in the modern churches, where most of the elders are average men of no real authority and leadership and only legal power, such elders will tend to want to be associated with the more powerful group, the majority. While this may sound a bit too judgmental on men whom everyone around them perceives to be “just fine” and not in any way deliberately evil, let’s not forget Peter’s example where he just went with the crowd instead of with the Lord (Gal. 2). Men of lesser stature and inspiration than Peter can be easily expected to commit the same sin, and in the absence of an inspired Paul to rebuke them publicly—or in the case where such Paul is banned or blocked from rebuking them by a majority decision—continue to fall deeper and deeper into it. A gang mentality is then developed and even nurtured in the sessions of the Presbyterian churches; a mentality which tends to reward conformity and acquiescence with sin and abuse, and which punishes principled dissent and individual opposition.

Plurality of elders, thus, consists not in the majority decision but in the individual veto. Only when a dissenting elder is legally empowered to block harmful decisions no matter how numerous a majority stands against him, and only when that elder is legally protected against revenge by the rest of the session, there is true plurality of elders.

These three, (1) accountability and liability for a session matching the session’s executive privilege in the church, (2) individual ministry and independence for each elder backing his personal authority to stand alone against opposition, and (3) the legal principle of individual veto and legal protection for dissenting elders (and for dissenting non-elders of good moral standing) must be incorporated into the legal rules and the actual practice of any Presbyterian session which claims to obey the principle of plurality of elders. Without any one of these three, the principle is compromised, and the final result is tyranny and abuse, even if on the surface a superficial resemblance of “plurality” is preserved.

Unfortunately, modern Presbyterianism lacks all three of these. First, there are no rules for accountability of a session in any of the major Presbyterian denominations in the US. In fact, as we will see later, some of them identify a church with its session to the point that when a session is dissolved or excluded from the denomination, the church gets dissolved and excluded as well. There are no rules for accountability of a session in respect to its church. There is no liability of a session as a collective to balance the executive power of the session as a collective. Second, there is neither a theology nor a practical ideology of ordaining the right people to eldership. Church sessions often resemble government offices: faceless bureaucrats whose only “authority” is their official position of institutional power. Most of those elders have no identifiable service to the church outside the session, no identifiable special gifting, nothing that would leave an individual’s imprint separately from their bureaucratic power. In fact, if anything, modern Presbyterianism seems to be eager to exclude “troublemakers” from its system of government, forgetting that it is those who are branded as “troublemakers” who move the church forward. Third, there is no legal protection for those “troublemakers” who happen to be ordained to office. To the contrary, an individual elder who takes the risk to stand against the majority and work to block their harmful decisions is legally open to all kinds of revenge. In an inverse manner to the session, such an elder has no legal power to affect the decisions of a session in any possible way—because majority rules, you know—but he is vulnerable to lawsuits and legal revenge from the rest of the session. And he is not entitled to any support by the same congregation whose liberty and rights he is trying to preserve—because in modern Presbyterianism, church courts are entirely controlled by ordained elders, with absolutely no power granted to non-elders.

In short, from being a model for republicanism, modern Presbyterianism has degenerated into a priestocratic oligarchy where the principle of plurality of elders is replaced with the principle of singularity of the session, and any individuals—elders and non-elders alike—are under the danger of facing legal action from the session if they dare stand in its way.

It is no surprise, then, that Presbyterianism in the US has lost so much of its cultural influence: within a century, it went from being the dominant framing worldview in the nation to a stagnant peripheral religious group who doesn’t even appear in the news. So stagnant, that abuse of power and corruption within it are taken for granted and unopposed by the very flocks of the Presbyterian churches. And so peripheral that the liberal media, naturally eager to spot and publicize scandals in the churches, don’t even bother to scrutinize the Presbyterian churches anymore.

Church discipline is seldom about real sins anymore; most of it consists of reactionary punitive actions against elders and church members who dare challenge the sessions about teachings or decisions. A former PCA elder confided to me several years ago that a significant part of the discipline cases in his denomination have to do with “disrespect to authority,” which is simply a way of describing any kind of dissent, legitimate and illegitimate. Cases of fornication, he said, are almost always left alone—especially when relatives of the elders are involved. Dissenting elders are not safe either; I have personally been a witness to at least two cases where an elder who dared stand up to the session was later framed for some trivial or imaginary infractions and forced to step down from his position of eldership. A similar case in the OPC just recently saw an elder known for his stand against the majority in the session taken to church court for something his wife had not done because of her chronic illness. (No, I am not making this up; it’s a real case.) As I am writing this article, a scandal is developing in another denomination around a Reformed celebrity, where in a case of abuse of an underage girl by a man in the church, the father of the girl was threatened with excommunication for daring criticize the elders for their failure to act on the side of justice. In another case, a member of the missionary committee of a local Presbyterian church was forced to resign after objecting to the church participating in a charity ministry in which openly occult organizations have ruling power. In another recent case, a long-time pastor, preacher, theologian, and political activist of unquestionable prophetic gift to the church was forced out of his church by the majority in the session, all of them mediocre men of no standing and no recognizable ministry in the church. His “sin” was his defense of the Christian liberty of a family in his church against a tyrannical decision by the session. And the examples can be multiplied. If all these scandals were made public, the Obama administration would look like pale amateurs compared to the corruption, tyranny, and lack of accountability in the Presbyterian churches.

In all this, the dissenters have absolutely no recourse against the sessions. The sessions always close their ranks and declare the dissenter an enemy; gang mentality is especially strong in Presbyterian circles. Without the legal possibility to defend themselves against a session, the dissenters have only one option: leaving the church. But even there, they are still targeted by the session’s revenge. The claim of some modern Presbyterian elders is that membership in a local church is a vow of loyalty to the local church—not to the universal body of Christ—and therefore leaving a local church must be done only by permission of the elders upon absolution from the vow. As staggering as it is that such practice can even be allowed in Reformed churches, I have seen it openly enforced in dozens of cases where members of good standing were excommunicated for no other reason but their desire to switch membership to another Reformed church, even in the same denomination! The Mafia principle has been adopted by modern Presbyterianism and reworked to fit its needs: from “No one gets out of here alive” to “No one gets out of here in good standing. You either stay and submit or we will destroy your reputation.”

Throughout the years, I have raised this issue with a number of friends who are members or even elders in one or another Presbyterian denomination: PCA, OPC, CREC, and some smaller denominations. In some cases they see the problem and have no solution for it. Most of the time, my correspondents attempt to justify the system by declaring that what I see are “a few bad apples,” but legally, their denomination has its rules and by-laws which deal with the issue. Then they direct me to the Book of Church Order of their denomination to find the legal solution to the problem.

But a close examination of the Books of Church Order of any Presbyterian denomination in the US shows that not only there is no legal solution, but the legal rules in fact encode oligarchic government and legal collectivism, and make it very difficult for individual dissenters from within a denomination or a specific church in it to block tyranny or to protect Christian liberty.

Take, for example, the Book of Church Order of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA).

The first obvious thing in it about ecclesiastical power is that the individual elder is stripped of the power to rule, and this power is given to a collective. This much is specifically said in the very first chapter of the BCO:

1-5. Ecclesiastical jurisdiction is not a several but a joint power, to be exercised by presbyters in courts.

The same principle is repeated in chapter 4:

4-3. Its jurisdiction, being a joint power, is lodged in the church Session, which consists of its pastor, pastors, its associate pastor(s) and its ruling elders.

The chapters on church government don’t give any information on what that “joint power” may mean: whether it means decisions by unanimous consent, or decisions by a majority vote. The clue about what this means comes from Chapter 45, “Dissents, Protests and Objections,” where points 45-2 and 45-3 describe dissents and protests as actions available to the minority in the session (or any other court) when it is dissatisfied with a particular decision of the majority. Therefore, apparently, the PCA expects that its church session will make their decisions by a majority vote.

It’s not clear what Biblical justification there is for such a practice. For our “democratic” age, it seems self-evident; but it certainly is not proven from the Bible. While the Bible does describe decisions by majority vote, in not a single one of these cases is the decision in agreement with God’s will. (See, for example, the people vs. Samuel in 1 Sam. 8; the 10 spies vs. Joshua and Caleb in Num. 14; court prophets vs. Micaiah in 1 Kings 22; Paul against Peter and the whole church in Antioch in Gal. 2.) On the other hand, there are examples of the Holy Spirit siding with a ruling body when everyone on that body is of the same mind. (See, for example, Acts 15; or the requirement for public executions in the Law for the whole community to participate, e.g. Num. 15:35.) If the Biblical evidence on the issue of collective action has any meaning, it is that God supports it when it’s an unanimous decision, but sides with the minority when there is dissent. Why the PCA has decided that imposing the will of the majority over the minority is a Biblical principle is a mystery to me. And the BCO provides no Biblical reference for such a practice.

What’s even worse, the practice effectively bans any dissenting elder from exercising his authority. It is, for all practical purposes, a surrender of the authority of the individual elders to the collective will of the majority. It is not rule by plurality of elders, but by singularity of the session. While in theory, the government of the church should be in the hands of the elders as individuals, in practice it is taken away from them and given to a collective. An elder only gets to rule effectively if he agrees with the majority. In the minority, he is legally banned from exercising his prerogative. It’s the collective of the session who rules.

And yet, with so much power vested in the collective of the session, the BCO doesn’t provide a single paragraph where the power of the session as a body is matched by any accountability or liability of the session as a body. The maximum “penalty” on a session is to have its decisions reversed by an appeal to a higher court (BCO 42-9). The BCO doesn’t allow for the possibility that a collective decision by the majority of a session may be as egregious a crime itself to deserve more than just a reversal but actual censure, or even court action against the session itself. And that even though the very BCO lists the cases in which an appeal may be filed, some of which may clearly indicate malice or outright wickedness on the part of the session:

42-3. The grounds of appeal are such as the following: any irregularity in the proceedings of the lower court; refusal of reasonable indulgence to a party on trial; receiving improper or declining to receive proper evidence; hurrying to a decision before all the testimony is taken; manifestation of prejudice in the case; and mistake or injustice in the judgment and censure.

In short, if the majority of the elders in a session conspire to do injustice, the worst liability they will experience is to see their decisions reversed by a higher court. No repercussions against them as a session.

And while the individual elder is stripped of his power to govern, and this power given to the session, he faces responsibility and accountability much greater than that of the session. He is liable to all the censures as any other individual in the church, plus removal from office (Chapter 30). There is a special chapter on rules for court cases against an individual elder. Interestingly enough, while the election of elders is a prerogative of the congregation (chapter 24), if an elder is removed from office by a decision of the session, the congregation has no power to demand his re-installment. It can only re-elect him after the session has removed the censure from him. Thus, in cases where the majority in the session acts self-consciously against the congregation in removing elders who stand against tyranny, the congregation has very little power to protect itself against a session that has gotten out of control.

This means that if a dissenting elder who interposes to protect the congregation from injustice is falsely accused, the most he can hope for is a reversal of the decision of his session by a higher court, and that only after a long and laborious process. His false accusers won’t face liability challenges for their false charges. The unjust judges in the session won’t face liability challenges for their injustice. They will be free to try again, with another false accusation and another unjust process, until they happen to have a favorable majority in a higher court which will uphold their decision.

Thus, the PCA’s legal rules are not exactly the environment where plurality of elders is practiced, nor where Christian liberty is protected.

What about the Community of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC)?

Theoretically, the CREC’s Constitution acknowledges the possibility of a church session committing sin as a body. The Constitution and By-Laws of the CREC, Article IV.D.4.d, gives the following legal reasons for a complaint against a local church session:

d) A complaint against the Session of a local church may be brought to a court above the local level only under the following circumstances:

i. when the Session of elders is accused of participating in or tolerating grievous dishonesty in subscription to the doctrinal or constitutional standards of the local church; or

ii. when the Session of elders is accused of gross misbehavior.

This looks like a good start to force some accountability on church sessions . . . but only until one realizes that the CREC’s Constitution doesn’t acknowledge a legal standing of a congregation separate from its session. Which means, any sanction against a local church session is by default a sanction against the local church as a whole, even when the session’s sin, injustice, or misbehavior were committed against their own congregation. The Constitution and the By-Laws don’t mention any specific sanctions against a session of elders; even though the listed reasons for complaint would warrant excommunication of the session as a whole in the most egregious cases, where the session is unrepentant, a session as a body is safe from repercussions, as long as they act collectively, as a body.

In the worst case scenario, a session may be sanctioned by the removal of the whole congregation from the denomination. As ludicrous as this may sound, it is actually directly suggested as a possibility in the Constitution. For example, in Article II.F., speaking of examination of elders, the constitution allows for the possibility that the session acts unwisely contrary to council from the Presbytery, and that the Presbytery may need to move against the session:

. . . The presbytery may or may not recommend his ordination to the session of the local congregation. The local session is not judicially bound by the recommendation of presbytery. If a local session does not abide by the presbytery recommendation, then the presbytery may or may not initiate proceedings according to Article IV.D.5.

But Article IV.D.5. specifically punishes the congregation for the actions of the elders:

The decisions of the assemblies with regard to the local congregation are spiritually authoritative. If the elders of a particular congregation choose to refuse the instruction of the broader church, the congregation may do so without deprivation of property. However, if their disregard of godly counsel is particularly egregious, the congregation may be removed from membership in the CREC, in accordance with constitutional procedure.

In short, if a member of the congregation, or the whole congregation, makes a complaint against their own session—as a body—for excommunicable offenses, the Presbytery has no legal mandate, nor any legal grounds, to demand accountability of the session, or to excommunicate the session as a body. In the heaviest sanction available, the victims suffer with the perpetrators in being removed from fellowship.

Thus, as long as a local session which has gone rogue against its own congregation closes its ranks and acts jointly so that no single elder can be taken to court for his individual actions and decisions, the session is safe. A complaint by a member of the congregation is highly unlikely, because in the worst-case scenario, the whole congregation gets punished for the actions of the session. At the same time any individual dissenting elder or member of the congregation who dares stand against the session is still liable at the local level, and can reverse a decision of the session only after an appeal; and even there, the Constitution sets certain limits on appeals (IV.D.3.c). To compare, there are no set limits on the jurisdiction and power of the local session.

Thus, the CREC’s Constitution is another example of judicial collectivism. Individual elders have no real power in the church, but are liable as anyone else; sessions, on the other hand, have all the power in the local church, but face no accountability nor liability. While the Constitution pays lip service to the principle of plurality of elders (Article II.C.), in reality, it rejects the principle and encourages singularity of the session, instead.

Let’s look at the Book of Church Order of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC).

Much to my surprise and contrary to my initial expectations when I started this study, the OPC is much closer to the ideal of plurality of elders than the other Presbyterian denominations. While in terms of the main issue—individual veto vs. majority’s diktat—the OPC doesn’t differ much, it has a much greater focus on two other points that are crucial for the practical working of the principle.

First, the OPC has a very clear focus on the individual gifting and the exercise of it by the elders. Chapter XXVI of the BCO, “Divesting from Office,” acknowledging briefly that an elder can be divested from office for “an offense in doctrine or life,” continues with mentioning the lack of gifting and the failure to exercise the gifts as a reason for divesting:

3. a. A presbytery shall consider divesting a minister of his office without censure if:

(1) he fails to seek a ministerial charge actively unless temporarily for reasons of health; or

(2) it appears to the presbytery, over a period of time normally not to exceed two years, that he is not called to ministerial service because he does not possess the gifts requisite for the gospel ministry; or

(3) he fails to perform adequately the work of the ministry through lack of the requisite gifts;

In addition, the next point puts additional pressure on ministers by requiring that they earn their authority by being helpful to the congregation:

4. a. A ruling elder or deacon may be divested of his office if his services do not appear to be edifying to the congregation. . . .

Both of these points, if followed faithfully in the legal and spiritual practice of the church, will tend to weed out the “bureaucrats” among the elders. The pressure is on the elders to be gifted and to actively exercise their gifts in order to retain their position of power. On the positive end of that pressure, elders will tend to be all individuals with strong callings and strong individualities, which, as pointed above, is a fundamental prerequisite to the successful operation of the principle of plurality of elders.

Of course, how much these clauses are paid attention to in practice is a different matter.

Second, the BCO of the OPC clearly distinguishes between a session and its congregation. This legal distinction starts with a declaration in the very first chapter of the BCO that I found stunning, given the modern views of church government in Presbyterianism:

The presbyterian form of government seeks to fulfill these scriptural requirements for the glory of Christ, the edification of the church, and the enlargement of that spiritual liberty in which Christ has set us free. Nevertheless, while such scriptural government is necessary for the perfection of church order, it is not essential to the existence of the church visible. (I.3.)

This means, translated into practical action, that the OPC would acknowledge a congregation as being part of the visible church even if that congregation doesn’t have a session, or doesn’t have any formal government whatsoever, as long as the following condition earlier in the clause is obeyed:

Among the biblical admonitions applicable to all circumstances are those requiring that all things must be done decently, in order, and for edification.

It sounds like, according to the BCO, the view of the OPC concerning church sessions is that the existence of a particular church government is predicated on that church government being only a means to a higher goal; the existence of a session is not a goal per se. This would tend to—theoretically, at least—weaken the power of a session, and thus force the session to work to strengthen its spiritual authority instead. It will also mean that a congregation has a separate standing from its session. And indeed, according to Article XIII.10 (and also II.D.1. of the Book of Discipline), when a session ceases to exist, the congregation is still a full-fledged member of the denomination:

If a session shall cease to exist or become so small as to prevent it from working effectively, the presbytery shall provide for an election and ordination of elders from within the congregation; or the presbytery, with the consent of the congregation, may appoint ruling elders or ministers, or both, normally from within the same presbytery, to be an acting session or to augment the existing session temporarily.

In case the rules of the OPC allowed for an excommunication of a session, this rule would prevent a congregation from being punished for the sins of its session.

The OPC’s official pressure on the church sessions to show themselves worthy of their calling and power is additionally reinforced by a special chapter in the BCO which recognizes the need for and the importance of what could be called “para-church ministries.” The first two points of that Chapter XXX, “Organizations of Members of the Church,” are worth quoting here in full:

1. Every Christian has the freedom and obligation to exercise the general office of the believer not only individually but also in fellowship with other members of the body of Christ. Members of the church may therefore associate together for specific purposes in the exercise of their common calling. Such organizations, however, under ordinary circumstances, shall not assume the prerogatives or exercise the functions of the special officers of the church.

2. When a church fails to perform its divinely given task, church members should seek remedies through biblical procedures of government and discipline. In the event that remedy cannot be obtained, or if the church is unable to work in a particular situation, Christians may organize to carry on activities that would more normally be conducted under the appropriate judicatory of the church, until these unusual circumstances are overcome.

This clause sets the OPC apart as the denomination that is the closest possible to the plurality of elders principle in the fact that it allows officially for creating alternative courts parallel to the official government of the church—and the opportunity is open not only to dissenting elders, but to all the members of any congregation in the OPC. Provided that church members are really educated about this option, this would at least create the basis for real accountability on a church session, to match its power.

Unfortunately, along with such good points in the BCO, the specific definitions of the power of the session over the local body are similar to those of the other denominations; and the lack of judicial accountability for the session as a body is the same. And again, while Biblical support is claimed for government by a collective, such Biblical support is not provided:

Government by presbyters or elders is a New Testament ordinance; their joint exercise of jurisdiction in presbyterial assemblies is set forth in the New Testament. . . . (III.2.)

It’s difficult to see where exactly this “joint exercise” as a dominant principle is set forth in the New Testament, and the BCO doesn’t provide any evidence for it. The New Testament gives examples of both joint exercise and individual veto, and it doesn’t declare one as dominant over the other. The Council in Jerusalem in Acts 15 shows both individual decision and joint action by unanimous consent as being legitimate method of government: In v. 19 James declares “it is my judgment” on an issue that is the fundamental issue of controversy in the whole church; and in v. 22 another decision is made based on “it seemed good to the apostles and the elders, with the whole church.” As I already mentioned above, in Gal. 2 Paul’s individual veto overruled the almost unanimous consent of the whole church in Antioch concerning interaction with Gentile believers.

All in all, such language in the BCO—without any specific mention of individual veto—doesn’t contribute to the principle of plurality of elders. To the contrary, it establishes the rival principle of the singularity of the session, effectively banning individual dissenters from being part of church government. Only those elders exercise jurisdiction who happen to side with the majority; the others have no say in it, and their “jurisdiction” is as good as no jurisdiction at all. If a dissenting elder is not legally capable of blocking a decision that he sees as sinful or unjust, then there is no plurality in any sense of the word.

In addition to this, of course, as in the previous two cases, the session as a body is safe from repercussions. While given jurisdiction over the local church as a body, the session faces no accountability as a body. The last chapter of the Book of Discipline of the OPC deals with the cases where there is a complaint against a session. The bulk of the chapter is concerned with legal procedures, and only the last point is judicial, covering the issue of what happens when the session is really guilty. The solution is such as to protect a session, no matter how evil its actions may have been:

If a judicatory is adjudged delinquent or in error by a higher judicatory, the higher judicatory shall determine what amends are to be made. (Book of Discipline IX.7.)

And this is the last point in the Book of Discipline. So it’s just amends. Which means, sanctions or censures are out of question. A session which makes an evil decision, even if found guilty by a higher court, is protected from real accountability or responsibility. The worst they can experience is being asked to make amends. For example, reverse the evil decision they have made. No punishment, no restitution, no threat of excommunication as a body for their evil decisions as a body . . . just amends.

Which means, immoral acts of individual elders—who by the BCO have no real authority individually—can bring liability on them individually; immoral acts by a session as a body—which has the real authority—are free of liability and accountability. For all the good things in the BCO of the OPC, gang mentality is still strongly encouraged by the very documents of the denomination.

The list can continue with the smaller Presbyterian denominations where the same principles of government are encoded. In all of them, one thing is obvious: While lip service is paid to the principle of plurality of elders, in reality, the principle is rejected and replaced with the singularity of the collective. And while the session is given collectively—or, “jointly”—all the jurisdiction over the local church, there is no corresponding level of accountability or liability for a session. Legally, the individual elder has no power, but is open to prosecution and censure; the session as a body has all the power, but is protected from prosecution and censure. Contrary to the claims of many Presbyterians today that even if the principle is not obeyed, it is encoded in the books, the reality, it isn’t, and the completely opposite principle is in those books.

The problem is not new nor recent, of course, and as far as the legal aspect of it is concerned, it is rooted in the theory of church government of 17th-century Scottish Presbyterianism.

It is seldom acknowledged—or even understood—that between mid-16th century and mid-17th century, the view of church government of Scottish Presbyterians underwent a radical change. So radical that had earlier Reformers like John Knox or George Wishart appeared in Scotland a century after their deaths, they would hardly be able to recognize their own doctrine of the church in the covenant documents of the 17th-century Scottish Kirk.

In the earlier phase, when Roman Catholicism was still politically dominant in Scotland, the early Scottish divines had a rather Congregational view of the government of the church. In the struggle with the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy over the pulpits, the early Scottish Reformers relied heavily on the support of the laity. Almost every one of these early preachers was either unordained or stripped of his ordination by the church authorities. Their appeal was to the people and to the secular rulers, to take charge of the pulpits and hand them over to faithful preachers, over against the corrupt and heretical Roman priests. Knox, Wishart, Buchanan, and many other early Reformers could have access to the pulpits only through non-ecclesiastical means, and they readily took advantage of those means to oppose the ruling church hierarchy of their day. The first half of John Howie’s book, Scots Worthies, has multiple examples of such unordained preaching and teaching and government in the churches in Scotland. No matter what is claimed today by Presbyterian historians, the roots of Presbyterianism in Scotland were congregational, not Presbyterian. Without this congregational rebellion of the Scottish people and rulers in taking over the pulpits and giving them to the Reformers, Presbyterianism might have never taken ground there. Their view of church government followed suit: The oversight and accountability of church government was to be entrusted to the people and their rulers. The early forms of the Scottish “National Covenant” were a mixture of congregational and civil control over the church and the pulpits; see, for example, the “Lords of the Congregation” and their struggles in the mid-16th century.

Within a century, the political situation in Scotland changed, and the views of church government of the Covenanters also changed, dramatically, in favor of a narrow denominational establishmentarianism which would secure for the Presbyteries the same power over the society as was previously enjoyed by the Roman Catholic Church. The locus of power, of course, would be now in the hands of collectives of church ministers—sessions and presbyteries—rather than bishops of monarchical power. The central ideologue of this Presbyterian high-churchism was Samuel Rutherford, in his two books, Due Rights of Presbyteries (1644) and The Divine Right of Church Government and Excommunication (1648). Both books were 800-pages long each, and they covered a number of individual issues in the controversies over the nature and structure of church government, but in terms of the principles of their approach to church government, they were a radical departure from the practice and the views of the earlier Scottish Reformers, and, for that matter, from the practice and the views of all the other churches and the denominations in the Reformed family. The very use of the term “divine right” already spoke against the hitherto established views that no matter what form the government of the church took, it had to be accountable to the congregation.

In his ideas, Rutherford went as far as to free the church leadership of almost all formal institutional obligations, including the obligation to church discipline; he argued against the notion that a true church is characterized by church discipline. On the other hand, while many obligations were canceled, the power of the “magisterial” ministers was expanded to where they could demand from the civil ruler to use his power to impose creedal unity on the population to the minutest details of doctrine. This violation of the practical Protestant rule, “in non-essentials, liberty,” which was the basis for common action and support between the different branches of the Reformed and Protestant world, shoved Scottish Presbyterianism in a radical sectarian corner in relation to the rest of the Reformed churches in Europe. It justly provoked severe criticism from other Reformed groups, and especially from many Puritans. John Milton specifically mentioned Samuel Rutherford as one of the “forcers of conscience” in a poem which ended with “new presbyter is old priest writ large.” To their contemporaries, the Scottish presbyters of the mid-17th century seemed a bit too eager to appropriate for themselves the same unlimited power the Romanist bishops had enjoyed a century earlier. A Christian establishment of division of powers and checks and balances was the accepted Reformed vision for the society; the Scots wanted a denominational establishment of “divine right” for the leaders of a narrow sect, free of any accountability to anyone outside their presbyteries and sessions.

Thus was the foundation for the problems in modern Presbyterianism laid.

Despite this foundation, though, Presbyterianism didn’t immediately degenerate into ecclesiastical tyranny and abuse. In fact, for the next 250 years after the publication of Rutherford’s two books, it seemed that most of the Presbyterian divines ignored Rutherford’s radical positions. Presbyterianism remained partially congregational, especially in America, where the pulpits were more often controlled by the laity than by presbyteries or sessions. In America, the Presbyterian churches adopted a much milder and more inclusive form of establishmentarianism than Rutherford’s rigid denominational version of it. One reason for it, of course, could be his love for scholastic argumentation and natural law. His long-winded arguments were hard to keep up with even for divinity students of his own time. Added the much more socially powerful practice of the Puritans and the other Reformed groups, and Rutherford’s high-churchism proved to be still-born from the very beginning, and quickly died out even in Scotland.

Another, more powerful factor for the cultural ascendance of early Presbyterianism despite it’s flawed view of church government were the charismatic views of its founders and early leaders. In the early struggles of the Reformation in Scotland, prophetic gifts and utterances, and miraculous experiences were commonplace among the Reformers, as John Howie’s Scots Worthies reveals. The second phase of the Reformation in Scotland didn’t diminish the high view of the operation of the Holy Spirit; the idea that prophecy had ceased after the apostolic age was not accepted as valid, and during the Civil Wars both Scotland and England, Presbyterians and Puritans, witnessed a revival of prophetic gifts and experiences. Both church and government authorities took these prophecies seriously and spent considerable time and energy verifying their truthfulness and validity; some of them were even incorporated into official government and church announcements at the time. Based on historical testimonies, there is hardly another period in the history of the church when so much of church and public life was guided by prophetic revelation.

Rutherford himself specifically acknowledged the existence and the validity of prophetic revelation in the present, post-apostolic era, and he mentioned Luther and John Knox among those who had prophetic revelation. His book on The Divine Right of Church Government required that prophets only prophesy under the auspices of the church; his claim was that a spiritual gift can only be exercised as a church office, and therefore there could be no “unordained prophets.” This specific argument, of course, was fallacious; for, if carried to its logical conclusion, it would presuppose ordination of women-prophetesses to teaching and ruling positions in the church (see Acts 21:9). Nevertheless, in combination with the high doctrine of the Holy Spirit and the charismatic practices prevalent at the time, it put pressure on the Presbyterian churches to seek out gifted men for the ministry instead of sitting bureaucrats. Church ordination in that period of Presbyterianism before the 1850s was more motivated by a recognition of already operational gifts and ministries than by any institutional needs of a church or organization. It is that period that gave us the greatest Presbyterian names who changed the history of the West—and the history of missions as well. It is in that period that Presbyterianism reached the pinnacle of its cultural influence, inspiring the American Revolution and a broader political quest for political and economic liberty, launching a global mission movement whose momentum continues even today. An astonishing number of business practices and enterprises, and charity organizations today have their roots in Presbyterianism of the 18th and the 19th centuries; and much of what is good in the modern political discourse has its ideological roots in Presbyterian theological writings of that period. Gifted and active men, considered rather “troublemakers” by the modern ecclessiocracy, were at the time actively encouraged to seek ordination and take up leadership roles in the church. The fallacious doctrine of church government was offset by the Biblical doctrine of the operation of the Holy Spirit, and the results were outstanding.

Predictably, the decline started when the doctrine of the Holy Spirit was replaced by the new rationalist doctrine of cessationism, in the mid-19th century. Even as Howie was writing his Scots Worthies in the second half of the 18th century, the rationalism of the Enlightenment was already dominant in the intellectual circles in Scotland. By the 1840s, it had taken over the church as well, so much that the 1846 edition of Howie’s book was purged of all mentions of supernatural gifts and miracles among the early Scottish Reformers. Within a generation, by the end of the 19th century, the Presbyterian churches in both America and Scotland transferred their leadership from men of spiritual gifts to men of bureaucratic acumen. Accordingly, the cultural influence of Presbyterianism declined. The 1930s were the last decade when developments within American Presbyterianism made national news: Machen’s losing fight against the entrenched liberal rationalist bureaucracy in the Northern Presbyterian Church and his organizing the new denomination of the OPC and the Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. Within a decade, American Presbyterianism was relegated to the periphery of American culture, where it remains to this day. Rushdoony’s words applied in full force:

In any case, where a strong doctrine of the Spirit is not operative and governing, a strong doctrine of the church replaces it, so that institutional controls and government replace the Spirit.2

And since those institutional controls and government were based on a false ideology about government—Rutherford’s “divine right”—they eventually led to decline.

Based on the historical trends of the last 100 years, it should be obvious that modern Presbyterianism is, for all practical purposes, dead. In some denominations, like the PCUSA, the name may remain but the essence is lost. In a number of smaller denominations an allegedly more “conservative” form may continue to linger for some time without any hope of restoring the power and cultural impact of the old Presbyterianism. (And in some of them—the PCA, for example—theological liberalism and its practices have been growing for the last several decades.) The Calvinist “revival” of the last couple decades seems to have lost steam; which was to be expected, given that it was strongly pietistic and essentially Arminian, focused entirely on personal salvation, not on the Kingdom of God.3 The seminaries that pass for “Calvinist” and “Reformed,” training men for the Presbyterian pulpits, are just as pietistic and essentially Arminian (even if Calvinist in name), limiting their courses to obscure theoretical subjects rather than building a comprehensive worldview in their students. A seminary graduate who can make a covenantal analysis of the modern society’s idols and pagan practices, and issue a practical call to his listeners for reforming the society, is almost impossible to find; seminary graduates are specialized in keeping themselves in the periphery by toothless pontifications on irrelevant issues.

In short, to borrow an idea from the Left Behind movie, if modern Presbyterianism is “raptured” out of the American society, hardly anyone would notice. Obviously, if there is to be any reconstruction or revival of Presbyterianism, it will have to start with a radical and comprehensive U-turn in the theology and practice of the existing institutional structures; or, in a completely new institutional setting which is a radical departure from the old one.

It will have to include change and restoration of doctrine in all areas where the original Reformed doctrines were lost: covenant theology, postmillennial optimism, theonomic ethics, the continuing validity of the gifts of the Spirit and non-canonical revelation. And it will have to include a restoration of the principle of plurality of elders and true authority in the government of the church: real plurality of elders and real spiritual authority, unlike the current practices of singularity of the majority and bureaucratic power.

First, of course, Rutherford’s magisterial view of church government must be discarded in favor of a restored ministerial view of church government. The magisterial view came down from Romanism and its Aristotelian paradigm of “natural law.” And Romanism picked it up from paganism, so it is essentially pagan, not Biblical. This difference between the pagan and the Christian views of government is clearly explained by Christ in Luke 22:25-27: among the pagans, the rulers “lord it over” and are called “Benefactors.” But it is not the same way among Christians where the great ones are those who serve. And those who serve must be subject to greater scrutiny and accountability than those who are served by them. Thus, there can be no divine right for church government, just as there is no divine right for civil government, which is supposed to be just as ministerial (Rom. 13:4, 6). This means that sessions must be under oversight and made accountable for their decisions as sessions. A legal provision must be included in the Books of Church order of any future Presbyterian denomination that if a session is found to have committed injustice in its official judgments, the session as a body—or at least those who have voted for injustice—must be subject to discipline, including excommunication. (With the option for individual repentant former elders of being received back in the church upon genuine repentance.) Not simply amends to the decision, not simply a repeal of the decision, but a full-force application of the principle in Deut. 19:18-19 to all ecclesiastical judicatories: the elders who have voted for injustice must be made to pay for it, in one way or another. No more anonymity, and no more freedom from accountability for elders who hide behind the majority vote.

Second, individual elders must be given a real opportunity to rule. Church government in the Bible is by elders, not by collectives of elders. This means that no group of elders can have more legal power in the church than an individual elder, and an individual elder must have the power to overturn or veto a decision by the majority which he considers harmful to the health of the church and the Christian liberty of its members. And when an individual elder overturns such a decision, he must be protected against revenge by the other elders; which can happen by giving the congregation the right to block legal action against individual elders who have acted in its defense. At every level, power must be matched by responsibility and accountability; the principle of Luke 12:48 must be established as the mainstay principle for church government: “To whom much is given, much shall be required of him.”

Third, the very philosophy of ordination must be overturned. Bureaucratic rationales for ordination like the perceived “needs” of the local church or denomination, or a seminary diploma, must be discarded. Ordination must be God-centered, not man-centered; and it must be an acknowledgment of God’s authority and spiritual gifts in individuals, not an occult ceremony of humanistic bestowing institutional power on men on whom God didn’t bestow spiritual authority. If Presbyterianism is to not only survive but also restore the dominance of the Reformed worldview in the culture, future Presbyterian elders must be completely independent in their individual ministries from their institutional power in the church; they should be granted that power only after they have proven to have true spiritual authority and ministry in the church, recognized by many people who have been ministered to by them. Only such independent men of spiritual authority can be the Pauls who would challenge the modern alliance of untouchable celebrities and faceless bureaucrats that currently keeps the church in the US in a cultural deadlock.

And fourth, the power of the sessions must be decreased, not increased. The churches need to stop being a baptized equivalent to pagan temples, administering ceremonial exercises and dispensing religious experiences on Sunday morning. Only a very small portion of the New Testament is devoted to detailed descriptions of what is to be done during church service. (And that very small portion—1 Cor. 14—is largely ignored even by those who beat themselves in the chest of being faithful to the Regulatory Principle of Worship.) The church needs to be a covenant community of whose real life Sunday morning is the smallest portion and focus. Applying the Gospel to every area of life by individual members of the church and their families must be the real focus; and church elders must be re-trained to become judges in the gates for the covenant community, and counselors for practical application.4 This also means that para-church ministries must be encouraged: both to allow men of superior gifting (and therefore possibly future elders) apply their gifts in the name of Christ to the different areas of life, thought, and action, and—just as important—to provide a legitimate alternative and even competition to church governments who have grown lazy, inactive, or outright unjust and tyrannical.

From the dominant cultural factor and source of moral and institutional standards and inspiration for economics and politics to an inconspicuous sect at the margins of the modern society, Presbyterianism in America has been the ultimate modern example of Jesus’ parable of salt that has lost its flavor. Any Presbyterian preacher or teacher today who ignores this decline or thinks that it has no covenantal significance in showing the need for correction and reconstruction, is guilty of deliberate deception. Any Presbyterian elder who throws the blame on the society, secularism, the unbelievers, etc., and not on the elders, sessions, and presbyteries of the Presbyterian denominations in the US is just as guilty. The rottenness of modern Presbyterianism is first and foremost in the seminaries, the pulpits, and the session meetings. That’s where the first changes must be made, and the old doctrinal and practical principles restored.

Many factors have led to this decline: covenant theology was lost, postmillennialism was lost, theonomy was lost, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit was lost.

And the principle of plurality of elders, once the inspiration for the political structure of our Republic, was lost in the very Presbyterianism where it first originated.

It is there where it must be first restored before we restore it in the society. Whether this will happen by reforming the existing churches and denominations or by demolishing the old structures and building new ones, will be seen in the coming generations.

Footnotes