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

Chapter Nineteen:
Reconstructionism's Gospel of Restitution

       The Reconstructionists' errors concerning the universal applicability of the Mosaic system and its accompanying sanctions leads them into even more serious errors regarding the nature of the Gospel itself. According to R.J. Rushdoony:

       The covenant circumscribes all men without exception. The original covenant was with Adam; the renewed covenant was with Noah. All men are either covenant keepers or covenant breakers; all men are thus inescapably tied to the covenant and its promises of love and hate, blessings and curses. Christ, in renewing the covenant, made it clear that all men are involved in it.... By becoming the sacrifice, the priest, and the divine renewer of the covenant of God with man, Jesus would draw all men to Him, i.e., become the principle of judgment and of salvation, of curses and of blessings."⁽¹⁾

       Rushdoony’s unbiblical monocovenantalism is plainly seen here: the “original covenant” with Adam has undergone a series of renewals — from Noah, to Abraham, to Moses — until it is finally renewed and forever established by Jesus Christ, thus binding all men to the demands of the law. To meet these demands is to be a “covenant keeper” and thus be saved and blessed; to fail to meet these demands is to be a “covenant breaker” and thus be judged and cursed.
       Gary North likewise declared that "the covenant that God made with Israel has now been extended by God to the whole world," and that the "gospel" therefore consists of "a sovereign God, a hierarchical system of governments, biblical laws, God's sanctions in history and eternity, and God's system of inheritance and disinheritance."⁽²⁾ In other words, the "ministration of death" is the "good news" which, according to North, the Church has been called to preach. This conclusion is shocking, but unavoidable. North's redefined "gospel" is the very fabric of his expectation of the Church's future world-dominion:

       To teach that the progress of the gospel in history is not progressive, i.e., that the gospel does not lead to worldwide dominion by covenant-keepers, is to teach that ethical cause and effect in history is perverse, testifying not to a God who keeps His promises in history but rather a god who breaks them....
       God gives His people blessings in history when they obey Him. This is a testimony to His reliability as the God of the covenant [Deut. 8:18]....
       This confidence in God's covenant should be the basis of Christians' confidence about the earthly future. God will progressively extend His visible kingdom on earth in response to the covenantal faithfulness of His people. The end result will be the creation of an international theocratic kingdom in which all nations and peoples will be formally covenanted to God....
       It is time to adopt a vision of victory regarding the kingdom of God in history. To do less is to betray the God of the covenant. As His sole, lawful, delegated agents in history, Christians must make visible in history the kingdom of God which exists already in eternity and exists judicially. The ascension of Jesus to the right hand of God was the definitive historical manifestation of Christ's kingdom reign; it is our task to make His reign manifest in history. This is the requirement of the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18-20). This spiritual and cultural commission must not be evaded or defined out of existence by His people [emphasis in original].⁽³⁾

       North, of course, is not alone in so misunderstanding the nature of the Great Commission and his reduction of the Gospel message to a message of covenantal sanctions and earthly dominion. According to George Grant:

       Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ — to have dominion in the civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness.
       But it is dominion that we are after. Not just a voice.
       It is dominion we are after. Not just influence.
       It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time.
       It is dominion we are after.
       World conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less.
       If Jesus Christ is indeed Lord, as the Bible says, and if our commission is to bring the land into subjection to His Lordship, as the Bible says, then all our activities, all our witnessing, all our preaching, all our craftsmanship, all our stewardship, and all our political action will aim at nothing short of that sacred purpose.
       Thus, Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land — of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ. It is to reinstitute the authority of God's Word as supreme over all judgments, over all legislation, over all declarations, constitutions, and confederations. True Christian political action seeks to rein the passions of men and curb the pattern of digression under God's rule.⁽⁴⁾

       Rushdoony likewise wrote:

       The redeemed are recalled to the original purpose of man, to exercise dominion under God, to be covenant-keepers, and to fulfill "the righteousness of the law" (Rom. 8:4). The law remains central to God's purpose. Man has been re-established into God's original purpose and calling....
       As the new chosen people of God, the Christians are commanded to do that which Adam in Eden, and Israel in Canaan, failed to do. One and the same covenant, under differing administrations, still prevails. Man is summoned to create the society God requires....
       God's covenant with Adam required him to exercise dominion over the earth and to subdue it (Gen. 1:26ff) under God according to God's law-word.... The restoration of that covenant relationship was the work of Christ, His grace to His elect people. The fulfillment of that covenant is their great commission: to subdue all things and all nations to Christ and His law-word....
       By His birth of God, and of the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ is head of the new race, as the new Adam, to provide earth with a new seed to supplant the old Adamic race.... As the second and last Adam, Christ undoes the work of the first Adam and begins the dispossession of the fallen race from the world and the re-establishment of the earth as the Kingdom of God under His new race....
       The goal is the developed Kingdom of God, the New Jerusalem, a world order under God's law....
       The blessed meek are those who submit to God's dominion, have therefore dominion over themselves, and are capable of exercising dominion over the earth. They therefore inherit the earth.
       This point is of very great importance. Apart from it, the gospel is perverted. Man has a God-given urge to dominion, to power. The purpose of regeneration is to re-establish man in his creation mandate, to exercise dominion and to subdue the earth. The purpose of the law is to give man the God-appointed way to dominion. The purpose of the call to obedience is to exercise dominion....⁽⁵⁾

       To deny this "cultural mandate" is to "deny Christ and to surrender the world to the devil."⁽⁶⁾ Rushdoony insisted that Reconstructionists "recognize in all things the primacy of regeneration,"⁽⁷⁾ but he redefined the term as the restoration of men "into the image of God and the calling [to keep the covenant] implict in that image"⁽⁸⁾ rather than the restoration of fellowship with God as the Bible defines it (2 Corinthians 5:18; Ephesians 2:16; Colossians 1:21). According to Rushdoony, the purpose of Christ's ministry and death was to recreate a race of covenant-keepers — the "royal race of the redeemed"⁽⁹⁾ — which would "make five-fold restitution" to the earth for Adam's rebellion by working to return it to its Edenic state: "Where God's law is broken, man's required penalty and restitution are made by Jesus Christ, our federal head. The violation of God's law, however, involves God primarily, and, secondarily, men and earth. Hence, there must be restitution; the sabbath year has as its purpose in part the restoration of the earth. Man must yield to the earth its due, for having taken from the earth."⁽¹⁰⁾ This was the mission that was supposedly given to and rejected by national Israel, and which is now likewise being rejected by all non-Reconstructionist, "antinomian" Christians: "In effect, we deny the cross of Christ if we fail to see how essential restitution is to all of life."⁽¹¹⁾ In fact, according to Rushdoony, one's confession of sin to God is invalid and salvation is incomplete if he fails to add to it the work of "civil restitution":

       True confession is restitution. Forgiveness is a juridical term in the Bible and means that charges are dropped because satisfaction has been rendered. Forgiveness thus means "satisfaction" or restitution. Confession is worthless, and forgiveness invalid, where restitution has not been made.... Salvation is inseparable from restitution, because God's redemption of man and of the world is its restoration to its original position under Him and to His glory. Man's work of restitution for the sin of Adam, for his own original sin as it has worked to mar the earth, is to recognize that, as a new creation in Christ, he must make the earth a new creation under Christ. The work of Christ in man is this work of restitution.⁽¹²⁾

       When this restitution has been accomplished through the subjugation of the nations to the Mosaic law, Christ will return and history will be complete. According to Rushdoony, "Man's justification is by the grace of God in Jesus Christ; man's sanctification is by means of the law of God.... Sanctification depends on our law-keeping in mind, word, and deed. The perfection of the incarnate Word was manifested in His law-keeping; can the people of His kingdom pursue their calling to be perfect in any way other than by His law-word?" [emphasis in original]⁽¹³⁾ Thus, blatant legalism lies at the very heart of theonomic Postmillennialism and since it is clearly the subject of the Apostle's condemnation in Galatians 3:2-3, this is one fact that its more moderate adherents have not been eager for the Church at large to discover.⁽¹⁴⁾ All the Reconstructionists' talk of "taking dominion" is rooted in an unbiblical monocovenantalism which teaches that the original covenant with Adam was renewed by Christ for the Church, and a false identification of "the dominion assignment of Genesis 1:26-28" with "the Great Commission to the church (Matthew 28:18-20)."⁽¹⁵⁾ However, the heretical implication is readily apparent: Adam was under the Covenant of Works — as are all of his unregenerate posterity — "wherein life was promised to Adam, and in him to his posterity, upon condition of perfect and personal obedience."⁽¹⁶⁾ This covenant has been forever broken and under it "those in Adam" have been utterly and hopelessly condemned (1 Corinthians 15:22; cf. John 3:18). Those who are "in Christ," however, have been removed by God from under this violated covenant and placed into the Covenant of Grace, wherein they live anew by faith in the Son of God (Galatians 2:20). Therefore, to equate the Adamic covenant with the Gospel is necessarily to mix law and grace, and to effectively destroy the latter. Furthermore, the so-called "cultural mandate" given in Genesis 1:26-28 was a command for mankind in general to exercise dominion over the earth; it cannot therefore be construed as a command for Christians in particular to exercise dominion over their fellow men in order to "dispossess" them. Nothing could be clearer than that Reconstructionism, with its carnal "tools of dominion," is "another gospel" which can only condemn those who knowingly embrace its tenets. If anyone is under the curse of Scripture, it is those who propagate such a false system: "I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel: which is not another; but there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ. But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you, let him be accursed. As we said before, so say I now again, If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed" (Galatians 1:6-9).

Endnotes

1. Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law, pages 655-656.

2. Gary North, When Justice is Aborted (Fort Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1989), pages 11-12. The reader should not miss North's claim that the so-called "five point covenant model" which Ray Sutton first "discovered" in 1987 is the very Gospel itself. Elsewhere, he admitted that this model has been rejected by "the vast majority of Christian theologians for over a millennium" (Political Polytheism, page 51), and that the historic creeds of the Church are in error and in need of revision because of their rejection of the same (ibid., page 57). The implication of North's assertions is that the true Gospel was virtually "lost" to the world in general, and to the Christian Church specifically, until it was "restored" by Reconstructionism in the latter part of the Twentieth Century. A more cultish claim would be difficult to imagine. Oddly enough, Greg Bahnsen completely rejected Sutton's covenantal model as "the artificial imposition of an imagined blanket outline with imprecise, pre-established categories" (Bahnsen, essay: "The Theonomic Major Response," in Gary Scott Smith (editor), God and Politics: Four Views on the Reformation of Civil Government [Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1989], page 247 [footnote]).

3. North, Political Polytheism, pages 143, 619, 620.

4. Grant, Changing of the Guard, pages 50-51.

5. Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law, pages 3-4, 14, 210, 357, 450.

6. Rushdoony, ibid., page 725.

7. Rushdoony, essay: "Jesus and the Tax Revolt," Journal of Christian Reconstruction (Winter 1975-1976), Volume II, Number 2, page 140.

8. Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law, page 449. The inescapable implication of this doctrine is that non-Christians, or "covenant breakers," do not possess the image of God, which contradicts Genesis 9:6 and many other passages of Scripture. The historic Christian doctrine is that the image of God in man has been marred, not eradicated, by the Fall. This being the case, taking dominion over the earth is not an exclusively Christian task, but it belongs to all mankind in general.

9. This phrase was coined in the 1990s by former Chalcedon Foundation associate Andrew Sandlin in his essay of the same title. Though Chalcedon apparently has removed the essay from their website, they continue to use the phrase in their doctrinal statement posted at www.chalcedon.edu/credo.php.

10. Rousas John Rushdoony, Salvation and Godly Rule (Vallecito, California: Ross House Books, 1983), page 292.

11. Rushdoony, Law and Society, page 207.

12. Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law, page 459, 463.

13. Rushdoony, ibid., pages 4, 307. Rushdoony admitted that this doctrine of law-keeping is not Protestant in nature: "Protestant theology left man justified but without a way to be sanctified" (ibid., page 307).

14. In Chapter Seven of Theonomy in Christian Ethics, Greg Bahnsen offered a generally orthodox treatise on the Holy Spirit’s central role in sanctification, and in the preface, he complained that his critics have wrongly characterized Theonomy for “making the law our dynamic of sanctification” (page xxi). However, in the foreword of the same book, Rushdoony reiterated his claim that “Salvation is by the grace of God through faith, and sanctification is by law” (page viii). It is clear that Rushdoony intended an analogy here: just as the grace of God is the dynamic of salvation (justification), so is the law the dynamic of sanctification. Bahnsen was apparently either unaware of Rushdoony’s meaning, or he was attempting to simultaneously maintain two contradictory positions.

15. North, Is the World Running Down?, page xxi.

16. Westminster Confession, Chapter VII:2.