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You have elsewhere asserted that you believe in God's sovereignty. Why then do you have a defeatest attitude when it comes to his ability radically to alter human governments and societies?

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Oh, I have great faith in the sovereignty of God, who sets up kings and removes kings. I have no faith in entrusting great power over the lives of individuals to fallible mortals who, in addition to being fallible, would also be operating under the assumption that since they were doing God's work they couldn't possibly be wrong and the ends would justify the means. (If you think that's an inaccurate characterization of theocracy in practice, just look at famous theocracies that have existed in recent and not so recent times.) I'll be delighted to submit to God's theocracy just as soon as Christ returns to earth and sets it up; until then the less power sinful men exercise over each other, the better.

On who determines what is a bare-bones necessity, I think most of them are fairly obvious: murder, theft, fraud, the assurance that contracts will be enforced and that those who injure others will be held responsible. In other words, the cone of certainty applied to civil law. There may be room for debate around the edges.

Now, as to Rod's points about my anecdote, Jesus dealt with a similar argument as follows:

"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye . . . say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets."

To every abuse I cite, you have a ready response: "That was them; this is us. We're right; they were wrong." But historically, a marriage of throne and altar has inevitably had as its progeny the Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, and an elderly Jewish man who hates Christians with every fibre of his being because he remembers them as bullies who beat him for refusing to violate his conscience. (I am deliberately using examples of Christian theocrats although Jewish and Muslim theocrats have historically acted pretty much the same.)

Even in the Old Testament where God actually had installed a theocracy what do we find? We find the sons of Eli and Samuel abusing the people through the offering system; we find Ezra and Nehemiah requiring families to be split; and ultimately we find a Sanheidren so thoroughly corrupt that they threw every principle to the wind to effectuate the death of Jesus.

Our central point of disagreement is that I believe any theocracy set up by sinful, fallen man will be the heirs of all that -- the children of them that killed the prophets. You disagree.

Oh, morally I think it's murder, and I doubt you would find many people, Christian or non-Christian who would disagree. The question is whether civilly and legally it should be murder. Those are separate inquiries.

For a general principle to be valid there is no requirement that there be unanimous agreement as to the details; if that were the standard then you would have to toss Christian doctrine since there are few if any doctrinal details on which Christians are unanimously agreed.

It's true there would be some disagreement, but the central premise of a libertarian system is utilitarianism, not morality. For example, we enforce contracts, not because it's the morally right thing to do (though I happen to think it is) but because commerce will become impossible if word gets out that we don't.

On this German cannibal, find me a utilitarian reason to lock him up and I'll help shut the door behind him.

I use Biblical assumptions to the extent that Biblical conditions still exist.

One of the major problems with theonomy, as I see it, is that God did not make a covenant with America as he made one with Israel. Simply put, the law of Moses was given to a nation with which God had specifically entered into a covenant (these days we would call it a treaty). God said that Israel would enjoy a special relationship with God in exchange for making God's law the law of the land.

So, any attempts to refer to the Old Testament for authority that this is or should be a Christian nation is simply apples and oranges. The major circumstance of the time -- a covenant made with the nation itself -- does not exist.

By the time Paul writes, Christians are living in a secular culture, as are we, so he doesn't tell them to seek political power; he tells them to live quiet and godly lives and pray for those in authority.

That doesn't mean that Christian faith is completely irrelevant or that Christians should be forbidden to enter public discourse. It just means that the Christian faith is more concerned with saving souls than it is with whether the pagans are acting like pagans.

I can't really come up with a good rationale for why we should make God's law the civil law on some issues but not on others.

Do you want to make laziness or gossip a criminal offense? That's not a rhetorical question; I'm curious about how far you take your position. What about heresy; if you became supreme dictator would you shut down all churches that you deem heretical?

And if not, then by what rationale do you make Divine law the civil law on some issues but not on others?

For me that's an easy inquiry (though as I said earlier there may be disagreement on specific applications): To the extent that Divine law and utilitarianism intersect, it is a matter of interest for the civil law. To the extent they don't, I leave Divine law to God. As Gideon's father pointed out to those who wanted to kill his son for tearing down a sacred grove, if your God is God he can deal with infractions of his law without my help.

You're only entitled to jump to application if your presuppositions allow you to. Mine do; yours don't. Let me explain.

Applying God's law to civil law is really a binary yes/no question, where for every circumstance we either:

A. Apply God's law or
B. Don't apply God's law.

To the extent that you don't apply God's law fully, you have not applied God's law. For example, the Israelites destroyed Jericho and complied with God's law 99% (the remaining 1% being Achan who stole a few chattels that were to have been destroyed) and God regarded the 1% failure as a total failure.

Libertarianism, which is based on utilitarianism, is not an either/or system because the essence of utilitarianism is that you do what works. You decide what kind of society you want to live in and then write whatever rules, with exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions, you need to get there. And even the purest of libertarians would acknowledge that if libertarian philosophy produces a bad result in a particular case you can legislate around it (though they would have endless discussions about how bad the case needs to be and what other alternatives have to be exhausted first).

So, this brings us back to my original question: If you want to apply Biblical principles to government, are you going to go all the way, and if not, then what is your bright line principle that tells you how to handle a particular case?

All the posts and cross-posts are somewhat confusing at this point. As I see it, there are really three issues on the table at this point, so unless somebody objects I'm going to attempt to distill to their essence the points of disagreement between us:

1. Who gets to decide? This is actually a question that any system has to resolve, because in a theocracy there will be disputes about what God's will is; in a utilitarian system there will always be disputes about the greatest good for the greatest number, etc. So you're always going to have to have somebody that makes a final decision. Whether that somebody is the voters, the courts, the legislature or the Sacred College of Cardinals, anyone who doesn't like the system is always going to challenge it by saying, Why should you be the one to decide?

As I read the 14th Amendment, the Constitution mandates libertarianism by elevating "liberty" to a fundamental right. No Supreme Court in my lifetime is actually going to make that ruling -- they're pragmatists, after all -- but if we take the 14th Amendment seriously that liberty is a fundamental right I don't see a contrary conclusion. And I think from a human standpoint, liberty is a good and an end in itself. So I would have activist courts with libertarisn presuppositions enforce liberty as a fundamental right while permitting legislators and voters to tinker around the edges.

2. How to decide what is the greatest good for the greatest number. I was unclear before, so let me state clearly that I believe liberty is the greatest good for the greatest number. As Lincoln pointed out, those who exchange liberty for security often end up with neither. (Somebody should tell that to George Bush.)

Greatest good, but not supreme good. To quote another late president, Thomas Jefferson, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. To say, You have the freedom to do as you like so long as you don't hurt others, is to imply that some conduct is harmful to others (directly or indirectly). If someone's exercise of liberty makes it difficult or impossible for the rest of society to function, well, the rest of us have rights too. And to determine particular cases, see No. 1 above.

3. How does all of this fit within a Biblical framework? For one thing, I think your presuppositions are completely misplaced. There has not been a nation with which God has had a special covenent since 70AD; God's primary covenant institutions since then are the church and the family. That doesn't mean God has written off government altogether; it just means there has been a difference in shift. And to see how the church relates to government, we don't look to the writings of Amos or Obadiah; we look to the teachings of Jesus and the writings of Peter and Paul. Peter and Paul wrote to the church in an age in which the church had displaced the state as God's primary corporate arm; Amos and Obadiah did not.

One searches the writings of Peter and Paul in vain for any hint that Christians are to seek to assert control over the civil government. Instead, we are repeatedly told to be good citizens, to pay our taxes, to be law-abiding citizens, to render unto Caeser the things that are Caeser's and to God the things that are God's. And we are told that someday Jesus will return to earth to establish a Divine civil government.

Simply put, you and I have different paradigms in our view of government in these, the times of the Gentiles (as we seem to have on most other issues).