CHRISTIAN RECONSTRUCTION What It Is, What It Isn't CHRISTIAN RECONSTRUCTION What It Is, What It Isn't Gary North and Gary DeMar Institute for Christian Economics Tyler, Texas Copyright, Gary North and Gary DeMar, 1991 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data North, Gary. Christian Reconstruction: what it is, what it isn't / Gary North and Gary DeMar. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 0-930464-52-4 : $25.00 (alk. paper) -- ISBN 0-930464-53-2 (pbk.) : $8.95 (alk. paper) 1. Dominion theology. 2. Law (theology) 3. Christianity and politics -- Protestant churches. 4. Millennialism. 5. Jewish law. 1. DeMar, Gary. II. Title BT82.25.N67 1991 231.7'6--dc20 90-22956 CIP Institute for Christian Economics P. O. Box 8000 Tyler, TX 75711 This book is dedicated to the memory of Cornelius Van Til whose expertise in epistemological demolitions created a new movement as a wholly unintended consequence. TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface, by Gary North " ix Introduction, by Gary DeMar ............................... 1 Part I: God's Covenantal Kingdom, by Gary North 1. The Nature of God's Kingdom 27 2. The Pietist-Humanist Kingdom 33 3. Humanism and Politics ............................ 38 4. God and Government ............................. 44 5. The Myth of Neutrality 51 6. The Four Covenants of God 56 7. Postmillennialism's "Faith in Man" 62 8. Premillennialism's Faith in Bureaucracy 66 9. The Pietist-Humanist Alliance 70 Conclusion, Part I 76 Part II: Questions Frequently Asked About Christian Reconstruction, by Gary DeMar 1. What Is Christian Reconstruction? 81 2. Will Christians Bring in the Kingdom of God in History? 96 3. Are Christians Still Under the Law? 100 4. Are We Sanctified by the Law? 103 5. Are We Now Under the "Law of Christ" Rather Than the "Law of Moses"? 106 6. Isn't Natural Law the Standard of Righteousness for the Nations? 108 7. What About "Denlocracy"? 120 8. What About "Salvation by Politics"? 123 9. Isn't Postmillennialism Really Liberalism? 127 10. What Role Does Israel Play in Postmillennialism? 132 11. Is Revolution the Way to Advance God's Kingdom? 140 Part III: Why Are Christian Reconstructionists Confrontational? 12. Are Our Critics Honest? Gary DeMar 147 13. What Is the Proper Response? Gary North 160 Conclusion, by Gary DeMar 183 Books for Further Reading and Study 191 Scripture Index 203 General Index 208 PREFACE Gary North In the summer of 1962, I first met Rousas John Rushdoony. I had read Intellectual Schizophrenia (1961) in the second semester of my junior year in college (1962), and I had corresponded with him. I was initially interested in his views regarding the possible connection between the Bible and the insights ofecon­ omist Ludwig von Mises, since he had referred to Mises in his book.1 It was a connection that I had begun pursuing on my own as a freshman in 1960. (I am still pursuing it.) Rushdoony was teaching at a two-week summer seminar for college students sponsored by what was then called the Intercol­ legiate Society ofIndividualists, today called the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. It was, and remains, the most intellectual of the student conservative organizations.2 Rushdoony had been brought to the St. Mary's College campus to lecture each morn­ ing on the Christian roots of early America. These lectures became This Independent Republic (1964). He had only recently left the pastorate in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church to become a staff member of the William Volker Fund, which was then one of the best endowed conser­ vative-free market foundations. (It was shut down in 1965, on the late founder's written instructions. The millions ofdollars in funds were eventually given to the Hoover Institution.) The Volker Fund financed the research and writing ofseveral of his 1. Rousas J. Rushdoony, Intellectual Schizophrenia: Culture, Crisis and Education (Phila­ delphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1961), p. 14n. 2. Its headquarters are in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. x CHRISTIAN RECONSTRUCTION early books. It put him on a retainer to write The One and the Many (1971) after the Fund began to be shut down in 1964. That retainer income financed his move to Southern California in 1965.3 He later dedicated the book to the administrator of the Fund, Harold Luhnow, the nephew of the late William Volker ("Mr. Anonymous"). It was Luhnow who had agreed to hire him in 1962, when Luhnow fired a group of libertarian scholars under the leadership of F. A. Harper.4 Rushdoony sent me Cornelius Van Til's apologetics syllabus in the fall of 1962, which I read and came to accept before I graduated from college that June. He hired me to come to the Volker Fund as a summer intern in 1963, and I lived with his family in Palo Alto.5 Essentially, I was paid $500 a month (a princely sum in those days) to read books. It was during that summer that I read the major works ofLudwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Murray N. Rothbard, and Wilhelm Roepke. It was the most important "summer vacation" of my life. At Rushdoony's insistence, I also read Van Til's Defense ofthe Faith. He had brought me to work at the Fund to provide the money for me to attend Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, specifically to study under Van Til. I had original­ ly planned to attend Dallas Seminary. I was a hyper-dispensa­ tionalist at the time (Cornelius Starn, J. C. O'Hair), though a predestinarian. The problem was, as I learned that fall, Van Til never assigned any of his own books to his classes, and his classroom lecture style was as close to Werner Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle as anything I have ever seen. I left Westminster after one academic year, but not before Professor 3. He did not return to the pastorate. He sought and received formal permission to labor outside the bounds of the Northern California Presbytery of the oPC, a status he maintained until he left the denomination in the early 1970's. 4. Harper had answered by mail some of my questions about economics as early as summer, 1961, and he brought me to the Volker Fund, located in Burlingame, Califor­ nia, that fall, a semester before I heard ofRushdoony. He gave me several books at that time, and a year later sent me Murray Rothbard's incomparable Man, Economy, and State, after he set up his own organization, the Institute for Humane Studies, in 1962. 5. Another staff member was Rev. C. John Miller, who later went to Westminster Seminary as a faculty member. Miller wrote a three-volume manuscript against public education while on the staff. It was never published. Preface xi John Murray's lectures on Romans 11 converted me to postmil­ lennialism. (I became a Presbyterian after reading Meredith Kline's 1964-65 Westminster Theological Journal essays on baptism that later became By Oath Consigned.) In 1962, there was no Christian Reconstruction movement. There was not even an outline of it. Over the next decade, Rushdoony developed the fundamental theological and socio­ logical principles of what was later to become a movement. I did sporadic work on biblical economics after 1964. He per­ suaded Hays Craig of Craig Press to publish my Marx's Religion of Revolution (1968). He put me on a part-time salary in 1970 ($300 a month) to help me complete my Ph.D. By then, I was writing almost every other month for The Freeman, and 1 was hired by Leonard E. Read in the fall of 1971 to join the senior staff of the Foundation for Economic Education. 1 completed my doctoral dissertation while on the FEE staff. Rushdoony had been deeply influenced by Van Til, whose dual classification ofcovenant-keeper and covenant-breaker had per­ suaded him of the irreconcilable nature of Christianity and its rivals. Rushdoony wrote By What Standard, published in 1959, as an introduction to Van Til's uncompromising rejection of hu­ manism. Like Van Til, Rushdoony believed that Christians need to abandon all traces of natural law theory. But this radical beliefinevitably creates a monumental sociological problem for Christianity - a problem that Van Til never addressed publicly in his career: "If Not Natural Law, Then What?" Van Til was analogous to a demolitions expert. He placed explosive charges at the base of every modern edifice he could locate, and book by book, syllabus by syllabus, he detonated them. One by one, the buildings came down. But he left no blueprints for the reconstruction of society. He saw his job as narrowly negative: blowing up dangerous buildings with their weak (schizophrenic) foundations. This narrowly defined task was not good enough for Rushdoony. He recognized early that there has to be an alternative to the collapsed buildings. There have to be blueprints. But where are they to be found? Step by xii CHRISTIAN RECONSTRUCTION step in the 1960's, he concluded that the source ofthe missing blueprints is Old Testament law. This was not a new idea. The New England Puritans in the first generation (1630-60) had also believed that Old Testament law is still binding on men and institutions. But after 1660, this faith in God's law steadily faded. By 1700, it was dead. The ancient discipline ofcasuistry - the study of how moral princi­ ples are applied to concrete historical circumstances - was aban­ doned by Protestant scholars. In its place came a new religion: Newtonian rationalism. This Unitarian import is still with us, though its luster has faded with the steady replacement ofNew­ tonian physics by modern quantum physics. Neither was Van Til's Calvinism a new idea.