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

Preface

       I became a Christian in late 1984. Like so many other modern Evangelicals, I never knew exactly what to do with the Old Testament. To me, it was a confusing collection of stories that all related in some way to an angry God taking vengeance on someone — usually the Israelites. If they were not being stoned for picking up sticks on the Sabbath or some other seemingly trivial offense, they were being hauled off to a foreign land for worshipping idols. The New Testament seemed so radically different. Sure, idolatry was still something to be avoided, but the Apostles were now leaving room for repentance rather than delivering sentences of death. Even adulterers were getting off easy with mere excommunication. It seemed clear that Christians were living under a completely different redemptive system than were the chosen people in the Old Testament. What other reason could there be for a God who was once so strict to be so lenient now? I was a Dispensationalist by default because I did not know of any other alternative. Even after I had embraced a Reformed soteriology, I still failed to comprehend what relationship, if any, the New Covenant believer had to the Old Testament.
       It was inevitable that something would eventually come in to fill this void in my theology. Theonomy was that something. In 1993, a friend of mine excitedly placed into my hands a copy of Kenneth Gentry's latest book, God's Law in the Modern World, and I read through it in only a few hours. God's Law was just a small book of little more than a hundred pages, but it packed quite a punch. Gentry's explanation of Matthew 5:17-19, Deuteronomy 4:6-8, and other theonomic proof-texts was so convincing that there was no longer anything to discuss — God intended the Mosaic law to be the standard throughout history, not only for the personal sanctification and national polity of His covenant people, but, more importantly, also as a "blueprint" for the governments of the world, and that was that.
       After a brief and somewhat heated confrontation with the pastor of the Reformed Baptist church I was attending, I soon found myself firmly planted in a theonomic congregation of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church where I would commence my nearly decade-long sojourn within the ranks of the Reconstruction movement. Being a voracious reader by nature, I devoured every book by theonomic authors the church bookstore had to offer, particularly those authored by Greg Bahnsen and Gary North. Under the supervision of the session, I began publishing The Quarterly Journal of Reformed Studies — a theological journal which was self-consciously modeled after the then-defunct Antithesis magazine of the early 1990s and which was primarily a soapbox for my new-found views. I also wrote numerous tracts, pamphlets, and books on theonomic themes. My zeal was even noted by Bahnsen himself, who made mention of some of my writings in a 1994 issue of his Pen Point newsletter. My wife had frequent telephone conversations with Bahnsen's secretary, Michael Butler, and she was told on more than one occasion that I had "great potential" and would be a good candidate for enrollment in Bahnsen Theological Seminary.
       Not long after moving to north Georgia to join a prominent Reconstructionist church in 2001, I unexpectedly found the theonomic rug pulled out from under me. Philip Mauro's critique of Dispensational Premillennialism entitled, The Hope of Israel, which had sat unread on my bookshelf for several years, providentially caught my eye one afternoon and I started reading it. As a committed Postmillennialist, I already knew why I rejected Premillennialism so I did not expect to learn anything new from Mauro's book. I was very mistaken. His biblical exegesis of the spiritual nature of God's Kingdom completely demolished not only his intended target, but my entire worldview as well. The scales instantly fell off my eyes and the entire theonomic system to which I had been devoted for so long suddenly seemed alien to me. Late one night, lying sleepless in bed, I suddenly turned to my wife and said, "I'm an Amillennialist now!" After years of hearing me mock Amillennialism as "impotent religion" and its adherents as "losers in history," this announcement must have come as quite a shock to her. Even more shocking to me was the almost effortless completion of the first draft of this book; it almost seemed to write itself. So radically had my position changed that I struggled intensely with self-doubt, worrying that I may have fallen into gross heresy. However, after re-reading my manuscript at least a dozen times, and receiving positive feedback from several Reformed ministers and elders to whom it was submitted, I finally surrendered to the conviction that my abandonment of the theonomic ship was biblically justified. Only the Holy Spirit could have brought about such an instantaneous and complete paradigm shift and it is my prayer that He will use this updated and expanded edition of my book to pull other people out of what remains today of the Reconstructionist movement.