Follow these links to the other parts of this review.
Political Polytheism -- Part 1
Political Polytheism -- Part 2
Political Polytheism -- Part 3
Political Polytheism -- Part 4
This is the second of a four-blog book review of Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism by Gary North, published in 1989 by The Institute for Christian Economics, Tyler, Texas. This is a book about politics as it really exists in the world. It is also a book about Christian faith and how Christians should view their place and their role in the world.
As in Part 1 of my blog, Part 2 consists primary of long quotes lifted directly from North’s book, along with an occasional comment.
Part 2 of North’s book is labelled Halfway Covenantalism. Chapter 3, 4 and 5 all speak of aspects of Halfway Covenantalism. North sums up Part 2 with this:
(pp. 301-303) “The spirit of this world has for almost two millennia clouded Christian philosophy by means of the doctrine of natural law. The Church has adopted variations of an intensely pagan philosophy based on neutrality, universal categories of reason, and the Greek idea of salvation through knowledge: ‘know thyself.’ It has overlaid these doctrines on top of Paul’s discussion of universal categories of ethics in the human heart:
“For there is no respect of persons with God. For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law: and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law; (For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified. For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;) In the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel (Rom. 2:11-16).
“What Paul taught was this: all men have been given sufficient internal revelation of God — the image of God in man — to condemn them eternally. “Know thyself” gets you into hell, not heaven. This light of internal revelation, through God’s restraining grace (‘common grace’), enables human society to function in history. God does not allow men to become totally consistent with their own covenant-breaking presuppositions. But to the extent that men become consistent with their covenant-breaking religions, they depart from this testimony of God’s ethical standards. Thus, natural law theory as a concept separated from biblical revelation is like every other doctrine separated from biblical revelation: wrong. The outline of autonomous law is wrong; the judicial content is also wrong.”
Chapter 3 Halfway Covenant Ethics
Chapter 3 consists of an extensive critique of the work of Cornelius Van Til. North’s contention is that, as much as Christian Reconstructionism is indebted to Van Til’s presuppositional apologetic, Van Til nonetheless is antinomian in that he rejected Old Testament Law as a basis of modern-day social and political reform.
North states (pp. 127-129), “Doubt concerning the relevance of the Bible to social affairs is universal in today’s Christian world. Christians have lacked the intellectual self-confidence that Cornelius Van Til’s presuppositional apologetic approach has offered them. But Van Til’s apologetic method has a crucial flaw in it: it is inherently antinomian. By this I mean that Van Til did not believe in the covenantal concept of law, as I have summarized this concept in Chapter 1. He did not go to the biblical covenant model, or even to its constituent individual parts, in order to build his apologetic system. Worse: in three of the five points, he either denied the truth of the particular biblical requirement or else completely ignored it….
“Van Til unquestionably defended point one: the absolute sovereignty of God. In fact, this is the heart of his methodology: a clear defense of the doctrine of special creation. He insisted on a radical distinction between Creator and creature. He also insisted on the total providence of God the Trinity. He defended the biblical concept of cosmic personalism, a Trinitarian doctrine. Van Til was a self-conscious creationist. More than any other philosophical system in man’s history, his is anti-evolutionary….
“The image of God in man was important for another aspect of his system of epistemology: the link between human minds, and between God’s mind and man’s. Epistemology asks: ‘What can man know, and on what basis does he know it?” Van Til taught that man is supposed to think his thoughts after God as a creature made in God’s image. This is clearly a system of hierarchical reasoning. Man is the subordinate. “Human reason is not a simple linear extension of divine reasoning. The human activity or interpretation always runs alongside of and is subordinate to the main plan and purpose of God.” God is the primary thinker; man is secondary. God thinks creatively; man thinks re-creatively. ‘The natural man wants to be creatively constructive instead of receptively reconstructive.’ To this extent, Van Til was faithful to point two of the covenant: hierarchy.”
Continuing on with his critique of Van Til, North states (pp, 130-131), “When it came to points three through five of the covenant, he was either silent (the content of God’s law: point three), or hostile (historical sanctions and historical inheritance: points four and five). Van Til’s amillennial view of God’s promised external, cultural, covenantal blessings (Deut. 28:1-14), as with premillennialim’s view, was exclusively attached to a trans-historical, discontinuous event: Christ’s second coming. This ethical futurism is the heart and soul of his system’s antinomianism. It is also the heart and soul of the antinomianism that today afflicts the whole Christian Church. It is the theology of ‘pie in the sky by and by.’ It is the necessary theological foundation of the various Christian versions of the escapist religion. Its widespread influence in our day has both paralleled and aided the growing influence of Marxist liberation theology, which correctly labels such a view of history as escapist and irrelevant to the material and social needs of people in time and on earth. The Church must abandon such a view of the supposed impotence of God’s covenantal judgments in history; if it refuses, planet earth will not be liberated….
“Van Til challenged the autonomy of man in every area of thought but one: law. He self-consciously and systematically destroyed the epistemological foundation of natural law theory: the concept of neutral human reason. He was a biblical presuppositionalist as no other Christian philosopher in history had ever been before him. He fully understood this, and he operated professionally in terms of this. He denied that at any point can men see anything neutrally. There is no neutrality anywhere in the universe, he insisted. You either believe God or you don’t. You are either a covenant-keeper or you aren’t.”
(p.133), “Rushdoony did use biblical law in the construction of his preliminary judicial restraining wall, so he had no fear of using Van Til’s apologetic system to attack natural law. This is why the Christian Reconstructionists have inherited the bulk of Van Til’s legacy. We alone are willing to blow up every dam based in any way on natural law, no matter where we find one, because we alone have a reliable retaining wall in reserve: biblical law. Nevertheless, we are talking here only of theory; we do not want to create a prematurely revolutionary situation. We must wait patiently for the general public to begin to accept, in theory and in practice, the judicially binding nature of the Old Testament case laws before we attempt to tear down judicial institutions that still rely on natural law or public virtue. (I have in mind the U.S. Constitution.)…
“Van Til’s original system has a glaring contradiction in it, one which doomed it from the beginning. All his life, he proclaimed the sole and exclusive validity of presuppositional apologetics. What did he mean by the term? He meant that there are two (and only two) ways of viewing the world: as a covenant-keeper or as a covenant-breaker. At the heart of his apologetic method was the fundamental concept of the biblical covenant.”
(p. 146) “In order to make all this so clear that nobody can miss what I am saying, let me say this: I am arguing for the continuing evangelical significance of God’s visible covenantal sanctions in history. I am arguing that the evangelical testimony of historical sanctions that was available to the nations round about ancient Israel is still in operation (Deut. 28). I am arguing that the existence of these covenantal sanctions in history still serves to persuade individuals of the inherent integrity of God’s law, just as they did in Moses’ day: ‘Behold, I have taught you statutes and judgments, even as the LORD my God commanded me, that ye should do so in the land whither ye go to possess it. Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. For what nation is there so great, who bath God so nigh unto them, as the LORD our God is in all things that we call upon him for? And what nation is there so great, that bath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law, which I set before you this day?’ (Deut. 4:5-8). I am arguing that amillennialism in general and Van Til’s amillennialism in particular has denied the New Testament continuation of this evangelical testimony.”
(p. 149) “Why do most Christian Reconstructionists believe that there will not be this falling away until the very end of the millennial era, just before the second coming of Christ? Because most Christian Reconstructionists have a very high view of the historical effectiveness of the work of the Holy Spirit. Premillennialist argue that Jesus must be present bodily in order to usher in His earthly kingdom (Christian civilization). So, for that matter, do amillennialists; they just say that because He will not return bodily to set up His earthly kingdom until He returns at the final judgment, there will never be a pre-final judgment earthly kingdom (Christian civilization). In contrast to these culturally pessimistic views, most Christian Reconstructionists believe that today’s presence of the Holy Spirit is sufficient to empower Christians to establish, as Christ’s ecclesiastical ‘body’ and also as His personal representatives and ambassadors, a self-consciously Christian civilization.”
(p. 155) “What no Christian Reconstructionist should ever argue is this: that historical sanctions alone will bring worldwide salvation. Men are not saved by law or by judicial sanctions; they are not saved by the testimony of law and the law’s visible sanctions. They are saved only by the work of the Holy Spirit. But what every Christian Reconstructionist must affirm is this: for men to reject God’s message of eternal salvation, they will have to reject progressively clear and progressively impressive testimony regarding the authority of God, God’s revealed law, and the sanctions of God in history. Rebels will have to reject all five points of the covenant. We dare not argue that the revelation of God decreases in intensity and clarity over history.”
(156-157) “…theonomic postmillennialists argue that long-term cultural faithfulness to God’s covenant law can only be sustained by the continuing work of God’s Holy Spirit in the hearts of men. Large numbers of people will have to be brought to eternally saving faith in order to sustain a worldwide holy commonwealth. This is in fact what I believe the rebels of the last day will do: rebel against near-perfect testimony of God’s grace in history: I do not believe that these rebels will constitute a majority of mankind. It is this process of widespread regeneration that alone can sustain international theocracy. Anything else inevitably must involve top-down elitist suppression by the State, and this is what we theonomic postmillennialists reject, both in principle and as a short-run tactic. We are calling for a bottom-up transformation of society. We are calling, in short, for democratic theocracy– the social, cultural, and (last of all) political product of a majority of eternally saved people.”
We live in an age where, particularly within Australia, Christians and the Church are seen as increasingly irrelevant. As I write these words, we are three days away from electing our next Prime Minister, with the incumbent Julia Gillard and the challenger Tony Abbott the only real choices before us. Mr Abbott is a well-known Catholic, but in the public debate he has chosen to, as it were, check his Christian beliefs at the door.
I found this interchange record into today’s online ABC in an article asking, quite rightly as far as it goes, why both parties were united in their opposition to gay marriage, yet neither wished to debate the matter publicly(http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2986220.htm):
"ELIZABETH DAKASH: With all due respect, Mr Abbott, will your religious faith determine the decisions you make for this secular country?
TONY ABBOTT: The short answer is no. I have never made a political decision based on a religious value. I have always made my decisions as a politician based on what I think are the ordinary, rational considerations that are open to people of all faiths or none and I don't think that my particular religious convictions should be held against me in this campaign any more than the prime minister's lack of convictions should be held against her."
Anything resembling the injection of a Biblical value into the election debate is seen as an unseemly and unwarranted intrusion of religion (read ‘Christianity’) into politics. How different is this from the story of Solomon and how at the height of his kingdom, the nations of the world, exemplified by the Queen of Sheba, travelled from all points of the known world to come and marvel at both his wisdom and his wealth. His wisdom still reflected Biblical Law and his wealth was evidence of God’s covenant blessing upon Israel even though his father, King David, had through sin planted the seeds of the demise of Israel shortly following Solomon’s death. Likewise, North firmly believes that some day—and it may still take thousands of years—some day, the nations will come and bow before the feet of Christ, the majority as redeemed believers and the minority as unrepentant covenant-breakers who nonetheless come to submit under the Rule of Christ.
Chapter 4 Halfway Covenant Social Criticism
Chapter 4 is an extended critique of the work of Francis Schaeffer. North concludes, (pp.219-220), “Such has been the fate of what was originally an implicitly conservative Christian ministry that had adopted an essentially negative, critical approach to culture: the rejection of humanism, the rejection of biblical law, the rejection of the idea of a national covenant, and the rejection of the possibility of building a Christian civilization before the second coming of Christ. Like the amillennialists Van Til and Dooyeweerd, and also like consistent premillennialists everywhere, Schaeffer had nothing positive to affirm concerning the future except the hope of a personal discontinuous escape from history: either death or the second coming of Christ, whichever comes first. For Schaeffer, death came first.
“In short, Francis Schaeffer’s ministry ran head-on into the hard reality of the old political slogan: ‘You can’t beat something with nothing.’ In a time of intellectual and social disintegration, which this century surely is, those clinging desperately to the collapsing center cannot be expected to do much more than hold on for dear life. The collapsing center surely cannot pave the way to a better temporal world when it is unable to hold things together. Without hope for the earthly future, Francis Schaeffer could not persuade the bulk of his followers to move off-center, away from pietism: neo-evangelical, Reformed, or fundamentalist. There were only three ways out of pietism when he died: liberation theology, theocracy, and apostasy. Schaeffer rejected all three. He died before the center collapsed. It is unlikely that his spiritual heirs will escape that easily.”
North then switches his attention to former (1981-1989) Surgeon General of the United States C. Everett Koop. Koop exemplifies the public and practical outcome of retreating from Biblical Law into ethical neutrality. Although my wife and I had moved to Australia as missionaries in 1977, I well remember how proud and happy I was over the election of Ronald Reagan as President and of his appointment of Koop, the Christian. I remember thinking, “Now we (Christians) can get on with the serious business of fighting Communism and cleaning up America.” Perhaps I was half right, although North would probably say I was completely wrong!
North says of Koop (p. 200), “Then came the 1986 Surgeon General’s report on AIDS. Koop in 1986 and 1987 officially called for sex education on AIDS in the public schools as early as kindergarten and for public school instruction on how to use condoms. We see here the classical Greek heresy: salvation through knowledge. ‘If men know what is right, they will do it.’ This is utter nonsense. It reverses the epistemological truth regarding fallen man, as Schaeffer fully understood….”
Koop is again quoted (p. 201), “I am the surgeon general of the heterosexuals and the homosexuals, of the young and the old, of the moral and the immoral, the married and the unmarried. I don’t have the luxury of deciding which side I want to be on.” This, according to North, is the essence of political pluralism: a man seeks to represent the entire community, meaning every individual self-proclaimed autonomous god. It invariably results in the abandonment of God’s law and the triumph of God’s enemies.
(pp. 207-208) “Koop’s public defection revealed that there is just about nothing remaining of Francis Schaeffer’s premillennialism-based, antitheonomic, pro-pluralism, silently Calvinistic, Christian protest movement….(quoting Jo Ann Gasper) ‘When Schaeffer was alive, he was the one man Dr. Koop respected and listened to. Schaeffer was a kind of moral rudder. Without Schaeffer he was left rudderless.’ The problem Koop faced was the problem all of Schaeffer’s disciples faced: without biblical law, they were adrift. He had led them into Christian political activism, and now he was gone. Within a few years, so were they.”
Personally (as a recovering pluralist!), and now since not only the passing of the Reagan years, but now the years of the two Bush presidencies, I can identify with that sense of being cut adrift. The Moral Majority failed to reform America as promised. Quite depressing, frankly, until more recently I have been exposed to the teaching of Reconstructionists like North, Rushdoony and North, to name a few.
North continues (pp. 208-209), “There is no escape from the concept of theocracy. The only question is: Which god is sovereign? Thus, a denial of biblical theocracy in history (pre-second coming) inescapably leads to the theological and emotional acceptance of a human theocracy or some other imitation god’s political rule in ‘the Church Age.’ Those who deny the historic possibility of the progressive sanctification of civil government must therefore also deny the existence in New Testament times of positive feedback between covenantal faithfulness to God’s revealed law and God’s external blessings in history (Deut. 28:1-14). Implicitly or explicitly, this is exactly what they do deny. They necessarily remove the institutional covenantal sanctions and promises from the New Testament era. The Old Testament then becomes God’s discarded first draft.
“This hostile attitude regarding the legitimacy of specified Old Testament covenant sanctions in civil government eventually spills over into Church government and family government. ‘We’re under grace, not law’ is a misleading slogan that cannot be bottled up in the realm of civil government; it reflects an attitude corrosive of all government: self-government, family government, and Church government. Thus, we find that biblical antinomianism — hostility to God’s revealed law – becomes either libertinism or legalism, and sometimes both. The best example of this dual process is fundamentalism’s hostility to tobacco and liquor — ‘Never, ever, for any reason!’ — and its institutional tolerance of adultery, especially by pastors. They may click their tongues, but they often do not permanently defrock their adulterous leaders.”
Lest North be dismissed completely as a “Bring it on!” confrontationalist, in terms of strategy, he states (p. 215, footnote 135), “I am not, let it be said, arguing that political pluralism cannot be defended as a temporary system during which all sides are mobilizing to capture the system permanently. There is nothing inherently wrong with a temporary cease-fire.”
Lest North seem to be completely dismissive of Schaeffer’s contribution, we find this (p. 216), “…he offered a glimmer of hope to a generation of Christian college students who were being indoctrinated daily by their humanist professors. He showed them that they could remain Christians without sacrificing their intellects. He thereby broke the spell of an influential humanist myth as well as a paralyzing evangelical suspicion, a myth that had prevailed since at least the Scopes trial of 1925. Schaeffer performed an intellectual service for the evangelical world comparable to what Henry” Morris and the Creation Science movement performed for fundamentalism: he encouraged Christian laymen by providing footnotes.”
I would count myself among that generation of university students influenced by, not only Schaeffer but also Hal Lindsay. In retrospect, I was fairly mixed up--sincerity only lasts so long! A few years later, I encountered the works of C. S. Lewis, and as I write these words, I am wondering if North has anything to say about this, the greatest 20th century Christian apologist. (Yes he does, both in the Preface, and a further on in his book.)
Chapter 5 Halfway Covenant Historiography
Chapter 5 is an extended critique of the thoughts and writings of three American Christian historians: Nell, Hatch and Marsden (Mark A. Nell, Nathan O. Hatch, and George M. Marsden, The Search for Christian America (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, 1983), p. 134.) Their collective, pluralistic contention is that America’s roots, dating from the time of the Puritans was not, essentially Christian: “…they reject the claim that New England’s civil order was truly Christian." (p. 257)
Against that, North writes (p. 249), “…the Puritans assumed that only those who professed faith in Christ and who were members of a church would be allowed by civil law to interpret and apply the civil laws of God. Why did they assume this? Because they understood the governing principle of representation in a biblical holy commonwealth: anyone refuses to affirm publicly that he is under God’s historical and eternal sanctions, he has no lawful right to enforce God’s civil laws on others. This was a recognized principle in American courts until the twentieth century: atheists, not believing in God’s final judgment, were not allowed to testify in many state courts. In short, the Puritans held to covenant theology: a sovereign God who rules hierarchically through human representatives in terms of His revealed law. The rulers are required by God to bring sanctions in God’s name against individuals who violate God’s civil law. Why? In order to keep God from bringing far worse sanctions on the whole society. But modern commentators, including our trio, deny either explicitly or implicitly that God brings such corporate sanctions in history. Thus, hypothetically neutral political pluralism seems safe and sound rather than full of sound and fury — fury against God’s law.”
Ahh!--C. S. Lewis re-emerges in this chapter (pp. 226), “What if C. S. Lewis… is correct in the statement in his novel, That Hideous Strength? Lewis wrote: ‘If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family – anything you like – at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren’t quite so sharp; and that there’s going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder.’”
Commenting on Lewis’ statement, North writes (p. 227), “Let me put it bluntly: as covenant-keepers and covenant-breakers become more consistent in thought and life, pluralism will be shot to pieces in an illogical (and perhaps even literal crossfire. Pluralism is a political arrangement based on a temporary religious and ideological cease-fire. When this cease-fire ends, pluralism also ends. So will the appeal of its ideology.”
(pp. 256-257) “The trio [the above-mentioned Nell, Hatch and Marsden) had already asked the modern neo-evangelical’s favourite rhetorical question regarding biblical politics: ‘. . . is it proper ever to look upon the American nation as the special agent of God in the world?’ They wait until the end of the book to answer this rhetorical question, and their answer, not surprisingly, is in the negative. What they, as self-conscious political pluralists, love to do is to challenge the assertion by Christian Americans that God has (or has had in the past) a special (i. e., covenantal) relation to this nation. Why? Because such an assertion raises the issue of national covenants, which in turn necessarily raises the question of biblical law and God? sanctions in history. They reject the idea of God’s covenant judgments against any nation in the New Testament era.”
At this point I am reminded of my devotional reading this morning, the story of Jehu as recorded in 2 Kings 8:16-29, 2 Kings 9:1-37, and 2 Kings 10:1-36. R. J. Rushdoony, in his devotional commentary ???, states that Jehu was indeed raised up by God, not for the purposes of redemption but of judgment. INSERT QUOTE
By the same token, following North’s line of argumentation above, it is entirely possible and reasonable to see that even modern-day, pluralistic America has indeed been selected by God for His purposes. Democratically and religiously pluralistic America has, at times in its history, suppressed this or that evil. It seems to do so consistently less and less all the time. And like Jehu, America’s calling may now be to judgment at the very hands of the God who called her. God who calls nations to be His hammer more often than not end up being the nail!
North then switches his attention to Thomas Jefferson and the other framers of the American Constitution. Referring again to Nell, Hatch and Marsden, he write (p. 261), “The authors try to persuade the reader of a second unusual hypothesis. Their first hypothesis is that the Puritans, being systematic covenant theologians, could therefore not be “truly” Christian in their worldview, because they believed that the civil covenant under God is still a valid concept. Second, they argue that the Constitution’s Framers, who were at best nominal Christians, invented a pluralist civil covenant which is supposedly the universal standard for a Christian society. Thus, the most self-conscious Christians in history (New England Puritans) were not truly Christians in their political views, while a group of essentially non-Christian pluralist politicians in 1787 devised the only legitimate civil foundation for American Christians to accept, now and forever more, amen.”
Nearly two decades have passed since North published this book. We have seen the world and its governments lurch from one crisis to another, being it Global Warming (whoops—Climate Change), the Global Financial Crisis, whatever, ad infinitum… Governments (and the United Nations) continually scramble for solutions to ever-more-urgent problems. (They also, of course, scramble to be re-elected by increasingly panicked citizens!) North’s words (p. 268) are eerily prescient, “The hopes and dreams of the pluralists are being smashed by the realities of the late twentieth century. The looming moral crisis cannot be indefinitely deferred. This also means that the covenantal connection between law and God’s historical sanctions cannot be deferred. Our political system, based on pluralism, is falling apart. It has become irrational. The government cannot deal with huge government-created problems that threaten the very fabric of the American social order. It cannot even discuss some of them publicly. (e.g., the inevitable bankruptcy of the Social Security ‘retirement’ program). David Kettler is correct: ‘It is not enough to remark that the American political order is biased and not, as ideological Pluralists contend, the neutral arbiter among equal contestants or the willing instrument of shifting temporary majorities; it is also necessary to see that the bias tends to produce irrational policies and actions .’”
North makes a rather startling assertion on p. 295, “There is an additional God-revealed limitation on the modern pluralist order, however, one which today’s pluralists refuse to acknowledge: civil government must not collect as much as 10 percent of its citizens’ annual net income to use in its various assignments (I Sam. 8). This tax limitation keeps the State small, which is not what today’s Christian
pluralists, so dominated intellectually and institutionally by Darwinian State-worshippers, want to accept as a governing principle. They have forgotten Samuel’s warning regarding State power. They have forgotten Deuteronomy 17’s warnings to the kings of Israel. This is not random amnesia. Covenantal forgetfulness is always the price which pluralism exacts from those who do not recognize its temporary tactical nature.”
Now that’s an interesting thought: would Christians accomplish more if they supported a limit on total government taxation upon income of 10%? It is hard to imagine what the consequences (presumably good, according to North!) would be. What other familial, social, religious and economic mechanisms of blessing could and would kick in to transform society under the feet of Christ’s Rule?
North conclude Chapter 5 (p. 298), “The United States is still a Christian nation. It is under the covenant sanctions of God, positive and negative. It may be a Christian nation in the sense that Israel was a covenanted nation just before the Assyrians invaded, or as Judah was when Nebuchadnezzar’s forces had surrounded the city, but this does not deny the covenant….the very imperfection of the American people’s subsequent commitment to this historic covenant is what now threatens us: a broken covenant is nonetheless a covenant when it comes to the question of God’s negative sanctions in history “ Such statements cause me to weep and tremble over the land of my birth where, in the words of a song every school child used to sing, “Land where my Fathers died. Land of the pilgrim’s pride. From every mountainside, let freedom ring!” I also weep and tremble over my adopted sun-burnt country, and pray that God’s judgment may yet somehow be averted on both.
North summarises Part 2 of his book (the contents of which are summarised in this, Part 2, of my four-blog review), as follows (pp. 301-302):
“The spirit of this world has for almost two millennia clouded Christian philosophy by means of the doctrine of natural law. The Church has adopted variations of an intensely pagan philosophy based on neutrality, universal categories of reason, and the Greek idea of salvation through knowledge: “know thyself.” It has overlaid these doctrines on top of Paul’s discussion of universal categories of
ethics in the human heart:
For there is no respect of persons with God. For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law: and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law; (For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified. For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;) In the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel (Rom. 2:11-16).
Follow these links to the other parts of this review.
Political Polytheism -- Part 1
Political Polytheism -- Part 2
Political Polytheism -- Part 3
Political Polytheism -- Part 4
Source: http://hammeroffaith.blogspot.com/2010/08/political-polytheism-part-2.html
