GOD IS JUST: ALL LAW IS THEOCRATIC

Chapter 8:

All Law is Theocratic

Since all law is moral, all law is religious; and since every religion has a god, then all law is theocratic. Remember, theocracy means “rule of God.” So when God and His rule aren’t acknowledged, then another god and its rule is acknowledged in His place. The choice then is between the true theocracy of Christ or a false theocracy of idols. Whatever reference point a society bases its law upon is that society’s god; thus a law-system’s reference point reveals the kind of theocracy a society holds to. For instance, if the law’s reference point is the Bible, then the law presupposes a Christian theocracy. If the law’s reference point is the people, then the law presupposes a humanistic theocracy.

Today’s secular humanists borrow much of their political philosophy from the ancient Greeks and Romans. For secular humanists, Greco-Roman civilization was happily non-theocratic, unlike Israel under God’s law. But as Rémi Brague points out, all of Western civilization has theocratic roots. While Brague doesn’t consider the theocratic nature of secular humanism, his point is well taken:

Although we modern Westerners commonly look down on “theocracies,” our systems of legislation are, or were, in some sense theocratic too. They are, or were founded in the last instance on assumptions that are theological in origin. And certainly, the idea of a divine law is not absent from our own Western tradition. On the contrary, it is emphatically present in both its sources—in Athens no less than Jerusalem, in Sophocles, Plato, Cicero, and many others, no less than in the Old Testament.142

Theocracy of some form or another is no less assumed in ostensibly religiously-neutral ideologies as it is in overtly theocratic assumptions in democracy and libertarianism. Democracy says, “vox populi, vox dei”—“the voice of the people is the voice of god.”143

Libertarianism says, “Each and every individual is a god unto himself.”144 

A democracy’s transcendent authority for law is the majority. It is a majoritarian theocracy, a mobocracy. The libertarian society’s transcendent authority for law is man’s autonomy. It is an autonomous theocracy, or auton.

Then we have liberalism and conservatism, with their respective faiths in what man will accomplish, or what man has accomplished.

Liberalism says, “Man is perfectible, and is making himself better all the time.” The liberal society’s transcendent authority for law is the bureaucracy, the representative embodiment of collective man and the mechanism for promoting human progress. Liberalism then is a bureauocracy.

Conservatism says, “Authority is found in the traditions of men.” The conservative society’s transcendent authority for law is the achievements of national ancestors. This amounts to ancestor worship, a heritocracy.145 And, there is pluralism, which says, “All religions and views are equally authoritative.” The pluralist society has several religious transcendent authorities for law. This amounts to a polytheistic theocracy, or, a polyocracy. 143  Theocracy, then, is inescapable. Consider the French Revolution.

While its pretext was building the first secular, neutral, non-theocratic society ever, it simply deified human reason in God’s place. Bent on

building a Reason theocracy, the revolutionaries converted “the venerable cathedral of Notre-Dame into a ‘Temple of Reason,’ dedicated ‘to philosophy.’”146 Other church buildings were converted to “temples of reason” throughout the provinces.147 During a “Feast of Reason” in the Notre-Dame cathedral,148 the theocrats designated their messianic

deliverer:

Madame Candeile, an actress and sometime opera singer, was carried in under the tremendous nave dressed in “an azure mantle garlanded with oak, holding in her hand the Pike of the Jupiter- People, heralded by young women in tricolor dresses.” The dignitaries of the Assembly in their medals and plumes cheered as the Goddess of Reason sat grandly on the high altar.149  

For the revolutionaries, Reason Incarnate had inaugurated her kingdom reign. Ironically, Jean Jacques Rousseau, a chief philosophical influence on the Revolution, said, “Never was a state founded that did not have religion for its basis.”150 This ostensibly religion-less revolution was, to quote Edmund Burke, “Atheism by Establishment.”151

Similarly, French Revolution critic G. Groen van Prinsterer calls the Revolution, “the religion, as it were, of unbelief.”152 He adds,

The principle of this vaunted philosophy was the sovereignty of Reason, and the outcome was apostasy from God and materialism. … I hardly need remind you that from the outset the supremacy of Reason was postulated as an axiom in philosophy.

This supremacy rested upon a denial of the corruption of human nature. But where Reason was considered uncorrupted, Revelation could contain nothing beyond its reach, or at least nothing against its verdict. Thus reason became the touchtone of the truth. … Holy Scripture, to be holy, came to need the sanction of human approval. It cannot escape the Christian that at this very juncture the Divine prerogative is already violated as man seeks to be rid of God and to be deified in His place.153

Reason for Revolutionary France was both god and holy writ.154 As opposed to a theocracy based on the “rule of God,” the French theocracy based itself on the “rule of Reason.” Then there is the French Revolution’s philosophical heir, the Russian Revolution. (Lenin, four months prior to leading the Russian Revolution in November 1917, approved of the Jacobin revolt.)155 The atheistic Russian Revolution took the French Revolution’s materialistic philosophy 156 to its logical conclusion and made its god, or basis for ultimate reality, matter.157 This revolution repeated a pattern from the first atheist revolution. Just as the French theocrats converted church buildings into “temples of reason,” Russia’s neo-atheist theocracy converted church buildings into “museums of atheism.”158 While the cathedral of Notre-Dame supplied the fodder for the greatest “Temple of Reason,” Leningrad’s Kazan cathedral supplied the fodder for the greatest “Museum of Atheism”— “Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism.”159

And, while the French theocrats worshipped “the goddess of reason,” the Russian theocrats worshipped the premier—Proletariat Incarnate, matter in its highest form. After the death of Lenin, the first communist premier, it was said: “Lenin lives in the heart of every member of our Party. Every member of our Party is a small part of Lenin. Our whole communist family is a collective embodiment of Lenin.”160

In the tradition of ancient Egyptians who mummified their deified Pharaohs, an “Immortalisation Commission” mummified Russia’s premier.161 Stalin repeatedly said at the funeral they would “honour” “thy [Lenin’s] commandment.”162 Stalin then took over and became Russia’s new god. He was heralded as the “father of the people,”163 of whom it was said, “Thou art the greatest leader.”164 A poem of that time reflects Stalin’s reputed god-like omnipresence and omniscience: “And so—everywhere. In the workshops, in the mines/In the Red Army, the kindergarten/He is watching … You look at his portrait and it’s as if he knows/Your work— and weighs it/You’ve worked badly—his brows lower/But when you’ve worked well, he smiles in his moustache.”165 After Stalin’s death, his successor Nikita Khrushchev reminded the Twentieth Party Congress that supernatural characteristics akin to those of a god.”166 The Russian revolutionaries had rejected the Kingdom of God for a kingdom of matter. This kingdom of matter would be inaugurated by the proletariat, who, in the words of Lenin, were “to set up heaven on earth.”167 Under the pretext of irreligion the Russian theocrats could not conceal their religion. Even the anti-Christian philosopher Bertrand Russell identified communism as developed in Russia as “a political religion analogous to Islam.”168

By their own speech, the Russian theocrats betrayed their professed irreligion. Lenin said, “Who plans whom, who directs and dominates whom, who assigns to other people their station in life, and who is to have his due allotted by others? These become necessarily the central issues to be decided solely by the supreme power.”169

Like Adam and Eve, in rejecting God, Lenin inescapably exchanged the Supreme Power for another “supreme power,” man. As Khrushchev would later affirm, “the people” are “the creator of history and … the creator of all material and spiritual good of humanity.”170 (Similarly, the Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-Tung wrote, “Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people.”)171 The Russian theocracy had thus rejected a biblical theocracy based on the “rule of God” for a material theocracy based on the “rule of the people,” more specifically, “the rule of the Proletariat.” And, let us not forget another philosophical heir of the French Revolution, American secular humanism. Like the French and Russian revolutions, secular humanism elevates reason 172 and matter.173 Its god is humanity, the embodiment of these attributes. In 1933, the Humanist Manifesto officially declared the humanists’ goal “to evaluate, transform, control, and direct all institutions and organizations by its own value system” (emphasis mine).174 

This language clearly indicates a desire to dominate society with the religion of humanism—to establish a totalitarian humanistic theocracy. Humanists were already in the process of converting a school system that originally taught Christianity 175 into temples of humanism. As early as 1930, the founder of the First Humanist Society of New York176 writes in Humanism: A New Religion:

Education is thus a most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of Humanism. What can the theistic Sunday-schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?177

Secular humanists figured out long ago how to circumvent the Constitutional guarantee against a nationally-established church: Simply label national secular humanist churches with the euphemism “public schools,” and have the church service times weekdays instead of Sunday, the day America associates with attending worship services. Then, deflect attention away from the religiosity of these humanist churches by positing a false dichotomy between secular and religious education. Such legerdemain has to this day duped Americans into unwittingly embracing compulsive humanistic religious instruction.

The secular humanist political platform is consistent with its desire to impose a theocracy in all areas of life. R. J. Rushdoony writes,[O]ur increasingly humanistic laws, courts, and legislators are giving us a new morality. They tell us, as they strike down laws resting upon Biblical foundations, that morality cannot be legislated, but what they offer is not only legislated morality but salvation by law … Wherever we look now, whether with respect to poverty, education, civil rights, human rights, peace, and all things else, we see laws passed designed to save man.

Supposedly, these laws are going to give us a society free of prejudice, ignorance, disease, poverty, crime, war, and all other things considered to be evil. These legislative programs add up to one thing: salvation by law.178

As Rushdoony observes, the secular humanistic faith pervades everything. Moreover, Rushdoony demonstrates that, despite secular humanism’s attempts to conceal its desire to impose a theocracy by appealing to neutrality, it is obvious that secular humanist policies are anything but neutral. They are all concerned with salvation of humanity by humanity; as the Humanist Manifesto II states: “No deity will save us;

we must save ourselves.”179 Secular humanists thus deify humanity. They look to humanity as their lord and savior. Lordship and salvation come through the state, the most physically powerful reflection of humanity. Secular humanism, in short, is as theocratic as any worldview gets. Even its religious pioneers could not escape repeated references to faith and religion:

The Humanist Manifesto I (1933) declares “to establish such a religion (of humanism) is a major necessity of the present,” and to “break with the past” in order to establish a “vital, fearless, and frank religion capable of furnishing adequate goals and personal satisfactions,” is the goal of humanism. 

The Humanist Manifesto II (1973) uses the words religion and religious some 19 times while stating that “Faith, commensurate with advancing knowledge, is also necessary,” among nontheists whose center of thought or worship is “nature, not deity.” Not only is there an influential journal entitled The Religious Humanist, but one of the most prominent humanists, Julian Huxley, referred to his beliefs as “the religion of evolutionary humanism” while still another, Michael Kolenda, entitled his book on humanistic religion, Religion Without God. Of course, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized humanism as a religion in Torcasco v. Watkins (1961), and The Secular Humanist Declaration (1980) concludes that “Secular humanism places trust in human intelligence rather than in divine guidance.”180 Secular humanism, instead of looking for salvation in Jesus Christ, looks to humanity for salvation. It rejects the theocratic “rule of God” for the theocratic “rule of humanity.”

The French Revolution, Soviet Communism, and American secular humanism are examples of how no matter how much man may try to not acknowledge any god, such attempts are futile, and therefore theocracy is inescapable. According to Romans 1:18-23:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

Thus, “Knowing that God the Creator exists and that they are the creatures of this God and owe him obedience, they suppress this knowledge. Unable to obliterate this knowledge, they pervert it into an idol …”181—a statue, Nature, Mother Earth, the People, Reason, Matter, etc.

Thus in their suppression of the knowledge of God, non-Christian societies—no matter how secular they claim to be—evidence this suppression by assigning God’s divine attributes to other things. To assign any of God’s divine attributes to something else is to, by the nature of the case, see that something as a god. While all humanistic societies actually have many gods, we especially find them looking to the state as divine. The humanistic society assigns God’s attribute of sovereignty to the state, which is seen to possess sovereign powers to control a nation’s destiny; it has, for instance, the power to predestine economic prosperity.

Humanists also assign to the state God’s attribute of omniscience, as the state is seen to possess the ability to “enlighten” the citizen’s mind via public education. God’s attribute of justice is also mimicked as the humanistic society that rejects God looks to the state as the transcendent standard of justice. And, humanism might assign God’s attribute of omnipotence to the state by seeing it as having the ability to save society (and in the case of the UN, even the world) via social programs. Thus the inescapability of theocracy is very clear when we consider that all societies that reject God nevertheless look to the state as a god by ascribing it with any number of God’s divine attributes.

FOOTNOTES:

142 Rémi Brague, “Are Non-Theocratic Regimes Possible?,” The Intercollegiate Review vol. 41, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 4.

143 Gary DeMar, “Theocracy: An Inescapable Concept,” Biblical Worldview

Magazine, January 2005, vol. 21, no. 1:7.

144 Ibid., 19.

145 We must be clear that this does not necessarily describe all whom identify themselves as liberals or conservatives. Since the political platforms of liberalism and conservatism change over time, their platforms at any given point in history might happen to line up more or less with biblical law. In an emerging Christian nation (e.g., Rome during the early church), those who hold to biblical law might identify themselves as liberals. And in a Christian nation in decline (such as ours),

those who hold to biblical law might identify themselves as conservatives. What we consider a bureau-crat is one whose ultimate authority in political matters is the state and the bureaucracy, and what we consider a heritocrat is one whose ultimate authority in political matters is tradition. Finally, we distinguish political conservatism from Christian conservatism. We do not reject the latter, which is a term (when properly understood) for identifying orthodox Christianity over against liberal (false) Christianity.

146 Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in

Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War (New York, NY:

HarperCollins Publishers, 2005), 87.

147 Ibid.

148 Scott, Robespierre, 208.

149 Ibid., 208, 209.

During that time the press wrote, “Liberty, represented by a beautiful woman, came out of the temple of philosophy, and taking her seat on the green sward, accepted the homage of the republican men and women, who sang a hymn in her honour, whilst stretching out their arms to her. Then liberty descended to re-enter the temple, but stopping before her entry to turn and cast a look of good-will upon her friends. As soon as she entered, their enthusiasm broke out in shouts of joy and oaths that they would never cease to be faithful to her.” Les Révolutions de Paris,

No. 215, 23-30 Brumaire, Year II (13-20 November 1793), 214-15. Cited in J.

Gilchrist and W. J. Murray, The Press in the French Revolution: A Selection of Documents taken from the Press of the Revolution for the Years 1789-1794 (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press Inc., 1971), 118, 119. Otto Scott paints a similar picture of a Jacobin Club meeting: “He [Robespierre] rose to speak inside the Club like one voicing the wishes of its gods, like a man who had visited the mountain. An observer wrote, ‘The nave of the Jacobin’s church is changed into a vast circus. The seats mount up, circularly, like an amphitheater, to the very groin of the domed roof. A high Pyramid of black marble, built against one of the walls—formerly a funeral monument—has been left standing, and now serves as a back to the office-bearer’s bureau. Here on an elevated platform sit President and Secretaries; behind them the white busts of Mirabeau and Franklin … In front isthe Tribune, raised till it is midway between floor and groin of the dome, so the speakers’ voice may be in the center. The imagination … recalls those dread temples

… consecrated to the Avenging Deities.’” Scott, Robespierre, 140-141.

150 Cited in Charles B. Galloway, Christianity and the American Commonwealth; or, The Influence of Christianity in Making This Nation, 20. Galloway’s quote cited in DeMar, America’s Christian History, 47.

151 Cited in Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 121.

152 G. Groen van Prinsterer, Unbelief and Revolution, 17.

153 Ibid., 17, 18.

154 As Edward J. Young writes, “To reject external revelation and to regard the human mind as a law unto itself is not to become enlightened but to fall into the grossest of deceptions. … To exalt the human reason, as though it in itself were the final arbiter of all things, is in reality to substitute the creature for the Creator.” Edward J. Young, An Introduction to the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1973), 21.

155 Nigel Lee, Communist Eschatology, 90. Lenin writes in Can ‘Jacobinism’ Frighten the Working Class?: “Proletarian historians see Jacobinism as one of the highest peaks in the emancipation struggle of an oppressed class. The Jacobins gave France the best models of a democratic revolution and of resistance to a coalition of monarchs against a republic. … ‘Jacobinism’ in Europe or in the boundary line between Europe and Asia in the twentieth century would be the rule of the revolutionary class, of the proletariat, which, supported by the peasant-poor and taking advantage of the existing material basis for advancing socialism, could not only provide all the great, ineradicable, unforgettable things provided by the Jacobins in the eighteenth century, but brings about a lasting, world-wide victory for the working people” (Ibid., 90).

French Revolutionary philosophy influenced Marx and Engels, the chief philosophical influences of the Russian Revolution. Engels writes of Rousseau, “already in Rousseau, therefore, we find not only a sequence of ideas which corresponds exactly with the sequence developed in Marx’s Capital, but we even find that the correspondence extends also to details, Rousseau using a whole series of

the same dialectical developments as Marx used.” Nigel Lee, Communist Eschatology, 87. Engels mentions the “Great French Revolution” as being the first bourgeoisie uprising to “entirely cast off the religious cloak” (Ibid., 88). Prince

Lvov, head of two Russian provisional governments prior to the Revolution, wrote,

“The spirit of the Russian people has shown itself, of its own accord, to be a universally democratic spirit. It is a spirit that seeks not only to dissolve into universal democracy, but also to lead the way proudly down the path first marked out

by the French revolution, toward Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” Cited in

Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror,

Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 44.

156 On the common French Revolutionary/Marxist views on materialism, Singer writes: “The empirical epistemology of Locke and his followers was no more successful than the rationalism which it replaced. Its major contribution to Western culture was to enhance the emergence of a secularism thoroughly embedded in materialism, a materialism which characterized the French Revolution and which ultimately produced Marxian communism and its philosophical satellites.” Singer, From Rationalism to Irrationality, 408, 409.

157 Lenin, for instance, states “We may regard the material and cosmic world as the supreme being, as the cause of all causes, as the creator of heaven and earth.” Cited in Nigel Lee, Communist Eschatology, 815.

158 Michael Burleigh, Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007).

From caption on third page of photographs in middle of book (no page number

given).

159 Ibid., 48.

This shift from “temple” to “museum” is logical. Marxism holds that matter is

the ultimate reality. “Temple” sounds too spiritual and thereby not material enough,

but “museum”—which connotes the display of raw material things—fits.

160 Michael Burleigh, Sacred Causes, 54.

161 Ibid.

162 Ibid., 53.

163 Ibid., 73.

164 Ibid., 72.

165 Ibid., 74, 75.

166 U.S. News and World Report, June 15, 1956, p. 34. Cited in James D. Bales,

Communism: Its Faith and Fallacies: An Exposition and Criticism (Grand Rapids,

MI: Baker Book House, 1962), 52.

167 Cited in Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian

Faith and American Culture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1990), 186.

168 Lester E. Denonn, ed., Bertrand Russell’s Dictionary of Mind, Matter, and

Morals, 30. Cited in Bales, Communism, 18.

169 Cited in Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, 116, 117.

170 Cited in Bales, Communism, 34.

171 Mao Tse-Tung, Five Articles by Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (Peking: Foreign

Languages Press, 1968), 15.

172 The Humanist Manifesto II (1973) states, “Reason and intelligence are the

most effective instruments that humankind possesses.” Cited in McDowell et al.,

Handbook of Today’s Religions, 467.

173 The Humanist Manifesto II (1973) states, “We find insufficient evidence for

belief in the existence of a supernatural.” Cited in Ibid., 464.

174 Cited in David Limbaugh, Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War

Against Christianity (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2003), 66.

175 DeMar, America’s Christian History, 108.

176 Limbaugh, Persecution, 65.

177 Cited by David A. Noebel, Clergy in the Classroom, The Religion of Secular

Humanism, 8. Noebel’s quote cited in Limbaugh, Persecution, 65.

178 Rushdoony, Law & Liberty, 2, 3.

179 McDowell et. al., Handbook of Today’s Religions, 464.

180 Charles W. Dunn, ed., American Political Theology: Historical Perspectives

and Theoretical Analysis (New York, NY: Praeger Publishers, 1984), 83.

181 John W. Robbins, Without a Prayer: Ayn Rand and the Close of Her System

(Unicoi, TN: The Trinity Foundation, 2006), 22.

SOURCE:  "GOD IS JUST: A defense of Old Testament Civil Law" by Steve C. Halbrook  51-61