JUDICIAL WARFARE
Christian Reconstruction and Its Blueprints For Dominion
by Greg Loren Durand

Chapter Eleven:
An Implicit Denial of Common Grace

       Reconstructionists categorically deny that natural law is a sufficient guide for human society, and insist instead upon the necessity of enforcing the written code of Moses: "If you abandon the continuing judicial authority of the Old Testament case laws and their sanctions, you must actively adopt or at least passively accept some other civil law structure to serve as the judicial basis of society. There are no judicial vacuums. Either God's law is sovereign in society or else autonomous man's declared law is sovereign. There is no third choice."⁽¹⁾ Gary North here committed the logical fallacy of the "excluded middle." With him, it is either the Mosaic law or humanism — "Christian Reconstruction or Tower [of Babel] Reconstruction";⁽²⁾ there simply is no alternative in his mind. Reconstructionism is therefore an implicit denial of God's covenant of common grace and a rejection of the historic Reformed doctrine of the moral law.⁽³⁾ Again, the Reconstructionists would attempt to deny this, but the conclusion is inescapable. In Genesis 8:21, God said, "I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake [despite the fact that] the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done. While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, etc. shall not cease." Christ Himself reaffirmed this covenant in Matthew 5:45 by saying, "[God] maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." The duration of this common grace clearly is "while the earth remaineth," but the Reconstructionist message cuts this short by its universal application of the sanctions of a localized covenant which ceased to operate in A.D. 70. This specific error will be discussed later.
       The Reconstructionists' implicit rejection of common grace,⁽⁴⁾ and their explicit rejection of natural law is most evident in their "no other standard" argument — i.e. that there is no other ethical standard for civil government outside the Mosaic law. How strange it is that entire civilizations grew up and prospered in the 1,500 years before God ever revealed the law to Moses! Why did Cain fear that he would be executed for murder by the societies to which he was fleeing, when they did not have the Mosaic law (Genesis 4:14)? How did Hammurabi, king of Babylon, formulate just property laws when he did not have the Mosaic law? How did Abimelech, king of Gerar, know that adultery was "a great sin" and upon what grounds could he complain that Abraham had "done deeds unto [him] that ought not to be done" when he did not have the Mosaic law (Genesis 20:1-9)? Such questions could be multiplied a hundredfold, but the answer to them all is the same: since all men are created in the image of God, they all instinctively know what His moral law is. How else can people who have never heard of the Mosaic law "hold the truth in unrighteousness"? The "no other standard" argument results in a denial of the Bible's clear teaching on the "light of nature" which God has impressed upon every human heart (Romans 2:14-15).⁽⁵⁾
       For example, when Paul presented the case against long hair on men, he asked, "Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?" (1 Corinthians 11:14); his question was not, "Doth not the Mosaic law teach us...?" In Romans 1:25-26, "the truth of God" is identified as that which is "natural" and we thus read that those "who changed the truth of God into a lie" engaged in activity "which is against nature." The Reconstructionists point to verse 32 to prove that all men know that sexual perversity is subject to the penal sanctions of the Mosaic law,⁽⁶⁾ but Paul did not mention those sanctions anywhere in his thesis. His reference was unmistakably to the "common law" of the covenant of common grace, or the "light of nature."⁽⁷⁾ On this subject, John Calvin wrote:

       [Paul] indeed shows that ignorance is in vain pretended as an excuse by the Gentiles, since they prove by their own deeds that they have some rule of righteousness: for there is no nation so lost to every thing human, that it does not keep within the limits of some laws. Since then all nations, of themselves and without a monitor, are disposed to make laws for themselves, it is beyond all question evident that they have some notions of justice and rectitude... which are implanted by nature in the hearts of men. They have then a law, though they are without law: for though they have not a written law, they are yet by no means wholly destitute of the knowledge of what is right and just; as they could not otherwise distinguish between vice and virtue; the first of which they restrain by punishment, and the latter they commend, and manifest their approbation of it by honouring it with rewards. He sets nature in opposition to a written law, meaning that the Gentiles had the natural light of righteousness, which supplied the place of that law by which the Jews were instructed, so that they were a law to themselves.⁽⁸⁾

       As we have already established, the natural law is sufficient to regulate an orderly society, even though it is not sufficient to bring men to salvation. Romans 13:1-7 teaches that the magistrate who rightly employs this law to restrain evildoers is "the minister of God to thee for good" (verse 4). In contrast, Gary North ridiculed those Christians who submit themselves "unto the higher powers" (verse 1) based "on the supposed 'natural conformity' to the Decalogue of their societies' legal order."⁽⁹⁾ However, Paul, who clearly taught the abolition of the Mosaic covenant in its entirety, would certainly not have contradicted himself by teaching in Romans 13 that the civil magistrate must enforce the penal sanctions of that abrogated law system. As a highly educated Pharisee, he knew that the origin of civil government is to be found in Genesis 9, not in Deuteronomy.
       It is a misunderstanding of this truth that has led some followers of Reconstructionism into all manner of civil disobedience and anti-social behavior, such as the abortion clinic "sit-ins" practiced in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Operation Rescue, and more recently the "Good and Lawful Christian" scheme of driving without licenses and tags and the filing of "non-statutory abatements" against local law enforcement agencies and judicial officers as a form of "paper terrorism." Such people are often very sincere in their attempt to apply theonomic principles to "every aspect of life," and most are relatively harmless, albeit overtaken by a serious error. However, their harmlessness is a result of their failure to fully achieve consistency with their worldview. According to Rushdoony, the acknowledged "father" of Reconstructionism:

       In brief, every law-order is a state of war against the enemies of that order, and all law is a form of warfare....
       Since law is a form of warfare, it follows that there is a required continual barrier to peace with evil. Man cannot seek co-existence with evil without thereby declaring war with God.... A law-order cannot escape warfare: if it makes peace in one area, it thereby declares war against another....
       The commandment, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," means also "Thou shalt have no other powers before me," independent of me or having priority over me. The commandment can also read, "Thou shalt have no other law before me"....
       The only true order is founded on Biblical Law. All law is religious in nature, and every non-Biblical law-order represents an anti-Christian religion....
       Peace with God means warfare with the enemies of God. Christ made clear that allegiance to Him meant a sword of division (Matt. 10:34-36). In a sinful world, some warfare is inescapable. A man must therefore pick his enemies: God or sinful man? If a man is at peace with sinful men, he is at war with God. Peace in one sector means warfare in another (emphasis in original).⁽¹⁰⁾

       Rushdoony went on to write, "Every court, because it is inescapably concerned with law, is a religious establishment."⁽¹¹⁾ Along these lines, Gary North asked the rhetorical question, "[W]hose law is enforced in the civil courts of this land, Baal's or God's?" and thereafter gave his answer, "Not God's."⁽¹²⁾ The Reconstructionists' unofficial motto is, "There is no neutrality," which phrase is repeated like a mantra throughout their literature. When taken to heart and consistently acted upon, this ideology can only produce dangerous enemies of the public who will view the undermining and destruction of the American political system as a religious duty.⁽¹³⁾ Rushdoony's "law is warfare" doctrine is often imposed upon the Apostle Paul's teaching on the civil magistrate in Romans 13:1-7, resulting in the interpretation that the magistrate is "God's minister" only insofar as he enforces the Mosaic law: "The commandment, 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me,' requires that we recognize no power as true and ultimately legitimate if it be not grounded in God and His law-word...."⁽¹⁴⁾ The conclusion is inescapable that the magistrate is not "God's minister" if he legislates any "other standard" and is instead a "beast," who must be resisted and, in the minds of some, overthrown; to submit to the "ungodly, statist, antichristian laws" enacted by such a government is to take upon oneself the "mark of the beast" and thus be damned.⁽¹⁵⁾ Their rejection of natural law as inherently humanistic leaves the Reconstructionists on the horns of a dilemma when they try to justify running for and holding office, or otherwise making use of the legal system, in a country which is not theocratic. If "all legal systems that are not derived directly from the Bible [i.e. the Old Testament case laws] have to be wrong,"⁽¹⁶⁾ and if "any other system of law" which even so much as "mixes the law of God with the laws of men" is "an Asherah [idol] next to the altar of God,"⁽¹⁷⁾ how can they avoid their own "antinomian" label when they thus acknowledge, at least implicitly, the legitimacy of the current political and legal system in this country? They cannot do so, and rarely do they try. This dilemma, of course, does not present itself to those who properly interpret Romans 13:1-7 in the context of the Noahic covenant of common grace, viewing the magistrate as "God's minister" as long as he enacts and enforces just laws in accordance with the natural law.

Endnotes

1. North, Tools of Dominion, page 18.

2. North, Political Polytheism, page 83.

3. North wrote, "'God's moral law' is the code phrase for the evangelical and Reformed man who does not want to be branded an antinomian, but who also does not want to be bound by the case laws of the Old Testament" (ibid., page 48).

4. I have purposely used the word "implicit" here because Gary North has written somewhat extensively on the subject of common grace in his book, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), and in Appendix A of Tools of Dominion (pages 953ff). However, it should be noted that North has redefined the term to fit his Van Tilianism (see the Introduction of this present book).

5. Oddly enough, James Jordan wrote:

       Remember, the exodus took place 857 years after the Flood. Shem, the Godly son of Noah, lived 502 years after the Flood. Thus there was doubtless much Godly influence all over the ancient world until well into the history of the seed people, Israel. The mixing of God's law with local customary law is called "common law," and considering that at the outset, right after the Flood, God's law was the only law, it is reasonable to assume that at this point in history there was still a strong common law. The law codes of the ancient world are at many places quite similar to the laws recorded in the Pentateuch — again evidence of a common source (Noah, and behind him, God) (The Law of the Covenant [Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1984], pages 44-45).

       If it is conceded that the common law existed worldwide one thousand years after the Flood, it is not unreasonable to conclude that it still exists and is recognized as authoritative even today. Such is, in fact, the case: "As distinguished from statutory laws created by the enactment of legislatures, the common law comprises the body of those principles and rules of action, relating to the government and security of persons and property, which derive their authority solely from usages and customs of immemorial antiquity, or from the judgments and decrees of the courts recognizing, affirming, and enforcing such usages and customs...." (Black's Law Dictionary [St. Paul, Minnesota: West Publishing Company, 1991; Sixth Edition], page 276). As we shall see, it is precisely this international common law which was taught by the Reformers of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, but is now denied by modern-day Reconstructionists.
       Although Jordan no longer considers himself a Reconstructionist, he definitely was such when he wrote the above words (reference: John Frame, "Introduction," in Jordan, Law of the Covenant, page xix). Gary North not only published The Law of the Covenant, but also credited it as one of the "exegetical books" he found "repeatedly useful" in writing Tools of Dominion, in which he asserted that "there is no such thing as a universal system of rational natural law which is accessible to fallen human reason" (page 28; emphasis in original).

6. Reference: Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics, pages 340, 440; Kenneth L. Gentry, essay: "Civil Sanctions in the New Testament," Theonomy: An Informed Response, pages 153-157; Gentry, He Shall Have Dominion, pages 138, 465.

7. The Westminster divines used Romans 1:32 as a proof-text for the statement that the civil magistrate may proceed against someone for "their publishing of such opinions, or maintaining of such practices, as are contrary to the light of nature...." (Westminster Confession, Chapter XX:4).

8. Calvin, Commentaries on Romans, pages 96-97.

9. North, Tools of Dominion, page 19.

10. Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law, pages 93, 94, 113, 781.

11. Rushdoony, ibid., page 619.

12. North, Political Polytheism, page 65.

13. Gary North has stated that Reconstructionists must "attempt to tear down judicial institutions that still rely on natural law or public virtue." He then added, "I have in mind the U.S. Constitution" (ibid., page 133). Rushdoony, on the other hand, was not nearly as consistent:

       The New Testament abounds in warnings against disobedience and in summons to peace. The key is regeneration, propagation of the gospel, and the conversion of men and nations to God's law-word. Meanwhile, the existing law-order must be respected, and neighboring law-orders must be respected as far as is possible without offense to one's own faith. The pagan law-order represents the faith and religion of the people; it is better than anarchy, and it does provide a God-given framework of existence under which God's work can be furthered. The modern perspective leads to revolutionary intolerance: either a one-world order in terms of a dream, or "perpetual warfare for perpetual peace" (Institutes of Biblical Law, pages 113-114).

       One can easily see the contradiction in Rushdoony's thinking: if "every law-order is a state of war against the enemies of that order, and all law is a form of warfare," and "peace with God means warfare with the enemies of God," then it is difficult to imagine how a Christian is to seek to live peaceably in a non-theocratic system without committing idolatry.

14. Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law, page 61. See also Gary DeMar, Ruler of the Nations: Biblical Principles For Government (Fort Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987), page 141; North, Tools of Dominion, pages 49, 316; Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics, pages 377-378, 384-385, 387-390.

15. David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation (Fort Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1984), page 31.

16. North, "Editor's Introduction," Theonomy: An Informed Response, page 17.

17. DeMar, Ruler of the Nations, page 47.