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On Treason to Theocracy
By Mainstream Baptist Fri May 19, 2006 at 01:29:22 PM EST printable version print story
R. J. Rushdoony, the founder of Christian Reconstructionism, was not reticent to express implications of his interpretations of God's law that would be revolutionary when applied outside the context of Ancient Israel.  

In his Institutes of Biblical Law he equated allegiance to modern nation-states with the idolatrous worship of Moloch.  Moloch was an Ammonite deity that required human sacrifice.  Worship of this god, along with the attending sacrifices, is synonymous with apostacy and evil in the Bible.


Rushdoony wrote:

Moloch worship was thus state worship.  The state was the true and ultimate order, and religion was a department of state.  The state claimed total jurisdiction over man; it was therefore entitled to total sacrifice. . . . For a state to claim total jurisdiction, as the modern state does, is to claim to be god, to be the total governor of man and the world.  Instead of limited law and limited jurisdiction, the modern antichristian state claims jurisdiction from cradle to grave, from womb to tomb, over welfare, education, worship, the family, business and farming, capital and labor, and all things else.  The modern state is a Moloch, demanding Moloch worship:  it claims total jurisdiction over man and hence requires total sacrifice. . . . God is the only true source of law; the state is an agency of law, one agency among many (church, state, family, etc.) and has a specified and limited area of law to administer under God.  The Moloch state denies any such boundaries:  it insists on taxing at will, expropriating at its pleasure by "eminent domain," and it claims to have the right to force the youth into warfare and death at the pleasure of the state.
     The Moloch state is the product of apostacy. (pp. 33-34)

If Rushdoony were simply preaching about the need for Christians to rightly order their allegiances and not be unquestioningly patriotic, few would disagree with him.  If Rushdoony were advising Christians to be prepared to conscientiously object to fighting in unjust wars and to resist the imposition of unjust laws, few would disagree with him.  But Rushdoony is saying more than that.  He is indicting every form of govenment that is not Christian and theocratic.  He expounded:

To attempt to govern or to take life apart from God's permission, and apart from His service, is like attempting to govern the world and the future apart from God. (p. 36)

The Bible is clear about God's judgment of idolaters.  Rushdoony wrote:

Deuteronomy 13 cites three cases of instigation to idolatry, first, in vv. 1-5, by the false prophet; second, in vv. 6-11, by a private individual; and, third, by a city, vv. 12-18.  The penalty in every case is death without mercy.  To the modern mind, this seems drastic.  Why death for idolatry?  If idolatry is unimportant to a man, then a penalty for it is outrageous.  But modern man thinks nothing of death penalties for crimes against the state, or against the "people," or against "the revolution," because these things are important to him.  The death penalty is not required here for private belief:  it is for attempts to subvert others and to subvert the social order by enticing others to idolatry.  Because for Biblical law the foundation is the one true God, the central offense is therefore treason to that God by idolatry.  Every law-order has its concept of treason.  No law-order can permit an attack on its foundations without committing suicide.  Those states which claim to abolish the death penalty still retain it on the whole for crimes against the state.  The foundations of a law-order must be protected. (p. 38)

Rushdoony appears to have searched for an escape hatch from the harsh implications of what he believes God demands.  He added:

This condemnation does not apply to a missionary situation, where the land is anti-God to begin with:  this is a situation for conversion.  It does require a nation grounded in God's law-system to preserve that order by punishing the basic treason against it. (p. 39)

Rushdoony's escape hatch is either cosmetic or he did not have the stomach for what his beliefs demanded of him.  He was much too logical and consistent to have failed to see the fallacy underlying this statement.

The laws Rushdoony wants to make applicable to all nations at all times were not given in the context of a "missionary situation."  They were given with a  command to wage a "holy war" to  conquer the land of Canaan.  Rushdoony's distinction regarding "missionary situations" smuggles in the idea of a progressive revelation that supercedes the harsh commands given to Israel at Sinai.  It undermines his previous contention that,

All scripture, law, prophets, and gospel is one word. . . . There can be no arbitrary separation of the law from the gospel:  one God means one word.  To divide the word is to divide God. (p. 30)

Whether Rushdoony recognized the inconsistency of his position or not, there is little doubt that some of his followers did.  I suspect that this may be the source of some of his differences with his son-in-law Gary North.  

A more obvious inconsistency in Rushdoony's escape hatch is the fact that Rushdoony and his followers do not see America as a "missionary situation."  In their eyes, America was founded on Biblical law.  That, I suspect, is why people like James Dobson, D. James Kennedy, Tony Perkins, and Rick Scarborough appear so impatient with the pace of the legislative and judicial reforms that they are pushing.  

Whenever the patient revolutionaries working through political processes are stymied, the more militant revolutionaries begin to act in more extreme ways to rid America of "apostates" who permit "treason" against God's law.  In their eyes, anything can be justified to protect the foundations of their "law-order."




Display:
It's rather interesting to me that Rushdoony uses "Moloch imagery"--comparison of something he is demonising to literal worship of Moloch.

I've seen "Moloch imagery" elsewhere in dominionism--specifically, dominionist anti-abortion groups claiming that abortions are "sacrifices to Moloch" and that women's clinics are "temples to Moloch".

This sort of imagery was quite common in the dominionist church I left (which was more of a "dominion theology" church rather than Christian Reconstructionist per se); it is also amazingly common within the more dominionist anti-abortion groups in general, including Operation Save America (the successor group to Operation Rescue), Lifesite.net,  a site calling itself abortionfacts.com (run by a dominionist group called "Heritage House '76"), and many others.  The terminology even shows up in dominionist groups not focusing on abortion per se, such as the Family Research Council and even a pro-dominionist site which manages to combine the "Moloch imagery" and the canard that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer.

This is a form of demonisation that, to the best of my knowledge, is pretty much only prevalent among dominionists and Christian Reconstructionists; in fact, the general mythos of "Satanic panic" in the deliverance-ministry community is in part based on Moloch imagery.  (Mike Warnke, in his falsified claims of being a "Satanic priest" who later became a dominionist comedian, claimed among other things to have sacrificed infants, and the sacrifice of infants (often with women specifically impregnated for the purpose of bearing children to sacrifice) is a major theme in dominionist myths of a nationwide diabolist network.)

So in the mind of the hardline dominionist, abortion is--quite literally--equated with Satanism, and doctors and workers at women's clinics are seen as literal high priests of the devil himself.  "Baal worship" is equated with Satanism; hence dominionists see women's clinics as sinister cabals and "fortifications of the devil".  With this imagery, it's no wonder that some dominionist groups have taken to forming "Christian Militias" and even bombing abortion clinics.

This is despite the fact that "ba'al" is an honorary title in most Semitic languages (including Hebrew and Phonecian, the language of Babylonia) meaning roughly "lord" and the "ba'als" condemned in the Bible tended to be variations on Ba'al Hadad, a deity commonly worshipped in the area, or other Phonecian or Babylonian deities.  (Of note, the "golden calf" noted in the book of Exodus is specifically an idol of Ba'al Hadad.)

Interestingly, we don't know if Moloch is the actual name of a deity or if it's the result of a mistranslation; some translations and renderings point to the actual meaning of "Moloch" being "their king" (as in king or lord of that nation).

by dogemperor on Sat May 20, 2006 at 10:03:40 AM EST

I've seen references to "Moloch" in anti-abortionist literature myself.

I hadn't made the connection with Rushdoony until you mentioned it.

by Mainstream Baptist on Sun May 21, 2006 at 09:52:49 AM EST
[ Parent ]



Here are links to the first three parts of an ongoing series on Rushdoony's Institutes of Biblical Religion

  1.  Presupposing Inerrancy

  2.  Presupposing Theocracy

  3.  Presupposing Propositional Truth


by Mainstream Baptist on Fri May 19, 2006 at 04:26:57 PM EST

So these "foundations" that Rushdooney provided and explicated seem to me to be one man's philosophy of biblical interpretation giving license to all sorts of hatred, bigotry and intolerance.  What I am always missing from this man (and his minions) is the gospel of inclusive love, radical acceptance and life-changing belief in a social and spiritual philosophy of hope--the church of love rather than the church of law.  Am I missing anything here?  

In my humble opinion,

Paul

by Pauljaxon on Sat May 20, 2006 at 08:59:43 AM EST

There's not much grace in Reconstructionism.

by Mainstream Baptist on Sun May 21, 2006 at 09:50:29 AM EST
[ Parent ]



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