Many pastors and Christians in general take 1 Corinthians 13:9–10 as a proof-text for the cessation of revelatory gifts in the church. The well-known passage reads, “For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.” In this passage, some readers commonly understand—or are taught to understand—“the perfect” (or “that which is perfect” KJV) to refer to the completed canon of Scripture. The coming of the “perfect” or “complete” written revelation would signal the end for any need to revelatory gifts, prophecy, etc.

I consider this explanation of “the perfect” to be incorrect. In fact, I think the whole endeavor to see 1 Cor. 13:9ff as an indicator of any major eschatological, doctrinal, covenantal, or revelational shift is to miss the point of the passage entirely. But so many people commonly refer to it in this way, or similarly, that it is worth outlining some of my views. Perhaps at least one person out there can profit from them.

The Context: Gifts of the Spirit vs. Fruit of the Spirit

To better understand the significance of the passage, we have to look at the context. Pretty much every commentator makes this point when addressing 1 Corinthians 13, as we should. The context is the use—more importantly abuse—of spiritual gifts in the Corinthian church. Thus this passage falls directly in the middle of three chapters (12–14), all of which deal with this problem at a very practical, individual level.

Beyond this even, the entire letter bears a tone of addressing a factious, divisive body of believers wracked with pride, competition, jealousy—constantly vying for preeminence among each other. We see this in the opening chapter as Paul confronts their divisions:

What I mean is that each one of you says, “I follow Paul,” or “I follow Apollos,” or “I follow Cephas,” or “I follow Christ.” Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? (1 Cor. 1:12–13).

It seems these believers were choosing favorite theologians, creating competing branches, perhaps even different schools of thought, and wearing these labels as badges of honor. Paul rebukes this throughout the rest of the chapter as misguided and boastful.

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In chapters 1–3, Paul argues that the Corinthians were acting selfishly, foolishly, and carnally—all things which caused them to miss the heart of the message of Christ. Indeed, in 3:1 Paul says, “But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ.” “Spiritual people” in the Greek is pneumatikois—literally “spirituals”—the same word used when introducing the context of “spiritual gifts” in chapter 12: “Now concerning spiritual gifts [pneumatikon], brothers. . . .” (Cf. also “The spiritual person” in 1 Cor. 2:15.) For the time being, Paul cannot preach to these people as if they were indeed “spiritual.” They are not mature enough: they are spiritual babies.

Also early in the letter Paul gives another label to those who are able to receive his Spirit-filled message. In 1 Corinthians 2:16, Paul says he does preach wisdom to those who are “mature.” The word here is the same as that in 13:10—teleios—only in a slightly different grammatical form. While we should not be too quick to make a direct connection here—as the word can have different shades of meaning in different contexts—it certainly does invite a close comparison.

So we have two textual connections of note here: First, the overall tone of the letter expressed early on is reflected in the immediate context of spiritual gifts (chapters 12–14). The important theme here is that of true spirituality (pneumatikoi) versus carnality.

Second, the Christian message Paul brings can only be understood via the Spirit—and the spiritual people who are given this gift Paul calls “the perfect” or “the mature” (tois teleiois). I believe this gives some background to the usage in 13:10.

Now the key issue here is Christian maturity. This is the mark of pneumatikoi in other places in Paul’s letters: “Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual [oi pneumatikoi] should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted” (Gal. 6:1). Obviously, these are the more upstanding, mature, loving, members in the local congregation.

I see no reason we should not treat 1 Corinthians 13 in the same way: Paul was encouraging the carnal members there to move onto teleios—“perfection,” “completion,” or “maturity”—and thus establishment themselves truly as pneumatikoi—spiritual. In fact, while most commentators dismiss it, we should not be so quick to deny the possibility that to teleion should be translated as “that which is mature” or “maturity.”

This background provides some necessary context for understanding 13:10. Paul is not making an eschatological or even doctrinal point, but, as we shall see, merely a pastoral one. The Corinthians were boasting and exercising all kinds of spiritual gifts, but they were demonstrating very little of the most important evidence of the Spirit—the fruit of the Spirit.

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Love is way better

Chapter 13 is prefixed by the final exhortation of chapter 12. After explaining all about being many members and one body, about different members having different gifts and different gifts/members having different perceived status and order within the body, he says “But earnestly desire the higher gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way” (1 Cor. 12:31).

It is this promise that segues directly into his famous discourse on “love”—for love is in fact that “more excellent way.” It is more than that even. The word is hyperbolen—from which we get our word “hyperbole,” meaning “absurdly exaggerated to make a point,” or “over the top.” In Scripture it is often translated as “exceeding,” “beyond measure,” etc. Paul is not just saying that love is more excellent, he is saying there is no comparison. He is essentially saying, “Guys, spiritual gifts are all well and good, but what I am about to tell you is way, way better. Far better. Better beyond any comparison.”

Especially compared to the fighting and posturing—and even blasphemy (1 Cor. 12:1–3)—that was taking place in relation to alleged spiritual gifts among the Corinthians, love was by far the better road indeed. For it is the road to perfection.

With this promise of Paul’s in mind, let us now read 1 Corinthians 13:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things (1 Cor. 13:1–7).

Indeed, love is exactly the opposite of how the Corinthians were behaving. Despite all their claims to spirituality based on whatever manifestations they had, their poor personal spirituality was betrayed by the way they treated each other.

But to ignore love is to ignore everything! This standard of love, upon which Jesus had said hung everything taught in the law and the prophets (Matt. 22:37–40; Deut. 6:5; Lev. 19:18), is the basic foundation for all of the Christian religion—the love of God towards us, and us in return back to him, and to each other (1 John 2:7–14; 4:7–21). This is the necessary foundation, the beginning, middle, and end, and without it nothing else Christians do has any meaning.

Indeed, love is the golden thread upon which all the beads of Christian faith and practice must be strung, or else be lost. It alone is the great eternal principle that must run through all other virtues. Thus Paul continues,

Love never ends [fails, falls]. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love (1 Cor. 13:8–13).

The comparison here between revelatory gifts and love is threefold: 1) a comparison between temporary and eternal, 2) a comparison between partial and complete, and 3) a comparison between childishness and maturity. These are all three facets of the same general comparison: love is way better.

First, the temporal comparison: “Love never ends [fails, falls]. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.” “Pass away” may be a little strong. The verb has a range of meanings. But being contrasted with “love” which “never fails,” the point is to emphasize the temporality of the revelatory gifts. But note, this is all that is in view in this comparison. It is not to emphasize the manner or even time of the passing of these gifts, but merely to note that they are temporal.

Given the theme of individual maturity, spirituality, and personal application throughout the letter as a whole and the immediate context, it is most reasonable to view the passing here as the passing away in relationship to the individuals who were actually using the gifts—not as a type of gift taken as a biblical abstraction. We will note more on this momentarily.

Second, we have the verse which started this whole study: “For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.” This contrasts the piecemeal, supplementary, nature of these revelatory gifts in comparison to “that which is perfect.” There is obviously a timing issue in play here: “when . . . will. . . .” We will address this momentarily also. For now, suffice it to say that the identity of “the perfect” here is “love.” The third facet helps us with this:

Third, there is a comparison of maturity. In light of the theme of spiritual maturity running throughout the book as we’ve noted, this comparison is the most enlightening:

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.

The emphasis here is on the contrast between childishness and maturity. And what has Paul been saying this whole time after all? What has been his remedy to all of the ills the Corinthians have brought into their own midst? It is to live by that “better way”—love. Grow up, go on to maturity. Love is that maturity.

It is of some note that Paul uses the same Greek word here as he did above for the prophecies and knowledge that would “pass away”—“I gave up (set aside, passed away, put away) childish things.” So Just as prophecies, tongues, and knowledge would “pass away” in contrast to never failing love, so “childish things” also “pass away” in contrast to maturity—by which we are to understand “love.”

This helps us properly understand the second comparison as well: that which is “in part” versus that which is “perfect.” Were this an isolated sentence, we may be strongly inclined by the grammar alone to translate to teleion as “the perfection” or as “the complete”—since its comparison is to “in part” or “partial.” But there is so much more to the context. That translation is certainly allowable and maybe even best on the surface, but it must be understood in relation to the theme of reaching maturity that permeates the whole. Maturity is the theme throughout the letter, and love is the way better road to maturity. Thus, here we should understand “the perfect” or “maturity” to refer to love as well.

Note the parallelism in Paul’s reasoning:

1)      Love never ends; revelatory gifts end

2)      The perfect comes; the partial becomes obsolete

3)      I reach maturity; I put aside childish things

Notice the structural-grammatical connections here: Love = perfection = maturity. Taking maturity here as spiritual maturity—the theme throughout the book—the connection is clear: love = to teleion = to pneumatikos.

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Thus, “the perfect” does not refer to the finished canon of Scripture. Indeed, given a full understanding of the context, that understanding is almost as absurd as it is arbitrary. It is simply a logical leap to think the focus in this sentence is upon God’s grand design for methods of revelation in the history of redemption. Love is the focus as the far better road to travel:

Love is the eternal principle of Christianity: it remains when all else passes away.

Love is the completeness of Christian revelation: if you have mastered this ethic, you need no other revelation.

Love is the full maturity of Christian life: arrive here, and you need to strive for no greater perfection, for all your works will be perfect.

These three comparisons are one and the same argument. By these comparisons Paul is trying to shift the priorities of the Corinthian believers from puffing themselves up against each other via boastings of spiritual gifts, status, etc., to growing up as Christians should do: learning to love and sacrifice for one another. Anyone who learns that will realize what true Christian perfection really is.

Love and Perfect Knowledge

My analysis above leaves off the last couple of Paul’s parallel reasonings. That’s fine, as what follows detracts nothing from the argument above. The following verse raises once again a question we promised to return to above, but also gives a powerful idea that reinforces our main point that to teleion is love. 1 Cor. 13:12 says,

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

Without going to too much length here, the main issue in both of these sentences—which are connected—is completeness in the sense of full clarity. A first century mirror was not like modern mirrors: it would not give the crystal-clear reflections we have today, but rather a blurry (like an out-of-focus photograph) or in some cases colored (by the nature of whatever type of metal had been polished—brass, bronze, etc.). Such a reflection was “in part” not in the sense of being cut, edited, bordered, trimmed, truncated, or anything within physical limits like that; rather, its partialness was in its blurriness. The Greek is ainigmati—from which we get our word “enigma.” It means obscure, dark, or a riddle.

Think about this: before the advent of the modern mirror, no one could have much idea how they themselves truly looked (with the exception of, perhaps, the reflection in a still pond or the work of a highly skilled artist—very limited circumstances). Thus it would be a true revelation to see oneself fully even as others view you—to see your own face as another could see you face to face. So Paul draws this analogy with the fullness of Christian maturity in love: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” In other words: to the extent that you can’t see your true reflection in a mirror now (then), to that same extent you can’t fully know God without love.

This is the same sense in which Jesus would have us grow spiritually. Compare the unique story of the healing of a blind man of Bethsaida:

And [Jesus] took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village, and when he had spit on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, “Do you see anything?” And he looked up and said, “I see people, but they look like trees, walking.” Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again; and he opened his eyes, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly (Mark 8:23–26).

The event is unique in the gospels in that the healing came in stages. It took two attempts—degrees—before the blind man was fully restored. In the first degree, the man has only a dim view, a blurry, obscure vision of things. But after full healing, the man could see clearly. At first touch from the Lord, the man saw dimly—he was yet incomplete. But with the fullness of healing, he could see men as they were. The Venerable Bede says, “By this miracle, Christ teaches us how great is the spiritual blindness of man, which only by degrees, and by successive stages, can come to the light of divine knowledge.”[1] There is a lesson here, then, about full spiritual sight and full spiritual maturity.

To have love, however, is to have perfect knowledge—not book knowledge, but spiritual knowledge. And Jesus demonstrates this for us in every sense imaginable. Thus Jesus, who first loved us and gave himself for us, is God’s perfect revelation to humanity. Jesus Himself, in all that He was and did, is that fullness of knowledge/love of which Paul speaks. Thus, Scripture tells us that Jesus is the full clear revelation of God’s word (John 5:46–7; Acts 15:21; Heb. 1:1–2). John 1:18 even says that Jesus by His incarnation exegeted [exegesato] the father. Yet Jesus Himself also says essentially the same thing of love (Matt. 22:37–40).

In his first epistle, John draws all of these same connections: “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:12). There that word is again: “perfect.” (Here it is perfect-tense participle, and in the passive voice: teteleiomene, the base form of which is teleioo.) The idea is exactly the same point Paul was making: true Christian spirituality means loving one another, and this is evidence that God’s Spirit dwells in us—true spirituality, in other words—and evidence that love is perfected in us. That is, “the perfect”—love—has come.

And John is here echoing his Gospel, 1:18, in saying “no one has ever seen God.” But just as Jesus dwelt in the bosom of the Father and exegeted Him—gave full revelation of God—so does the Christian who has been perfected in love and thus loves one another. This person has full knowledge and full spiritual vision.

Much of the New Testament makes these same connections. John, as we just noted, is especially strong this regard:

Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?” Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me (John 14:21–24; Cf. John 15:7–17).

Thus in love, Jesus is fully manifested to the Christian believer—there is not further need for spiritual revelatory gifts in that case.

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Compare John’s first epistle:

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother (1 John 4:7–21).

For Paul, (as with Jesus in Matt. 22:37–40), love is the fullness of the law:

Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law (Rom 13:8–10).

He repeats the same argument in Galatians 5:13–14. In Galatians 3:3 he connects spirituality with perfection: “Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?” (Gal. 3:3). The rhetorical question assumes the answer: “No. You can only be perfected by the Spirit.”

Earlier in 1 Corinthians, Paul gives a direct connection between informational “knowledge,” and spiritual knowledge based on love. The latter leads to maturity, spiritual edification, and being known by God:

Now concerning food offered to idols: we know that “all of us possess knowledge.” This “knowledge” puffs up, but love builds up. If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. But if anyone loves God, he is known by God (1 Cor. 8:1–3).

Consider: this spiritual “he is known by God” is the same “face to face. . . . I have been fully known” that Paul elucidates in 13:12. The power behind both is love.

Paul connects love and knowledge again in Philippians 1:9. It’s almost over-the-top in Colossians 2:1–3:

For I want you to know how great a struggle I have for you and for those at Laodicea and for all who have not seen me face to face, that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

James ties perfection to patience—a fruit of the Spirit and thus mark of maturity—amidst trials. He writes, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing” (James 1:2–4).

James also speaks of Christian ethics as “the perfect law of lberty,” and uses a similar mirror analogy as Paul:

For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect [teleion] law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing (James 1:23–5).

Again, Christian maturity indicates perfection: “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For we all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect [teleios] man, able also to bridle his whole body (James 3:1–2).

There are dozens more verses to cover, but finally for now consider Ephesians 4:7–16:

But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore it says, “When he ascended on high he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men.”        (In saying, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth? He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.) And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature [teleion] manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love (Eph. 4:7–16).

Here Paul says that perfection (here “mature”) is to have knowledge, to be like Christ in His fullness, not childish but mature and steadfast, and reflecting that maturity through words and actions of love. This is essentially the same teaching given in 1 Corinthians 13.

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What of the revelatory gifts, then?

I realize the analysis given above leaves open the possibility that the revelatory gifts are still in operation. I have no problem with that, although in my personal experience–which includes at one time nearly five years as a Pentecostal—I can’t say I have every experienced a genuine, undeniable case of tongues, prophecy, or interpretation of tongues. Even if I did, however, any such experience could not stand as an authoritative argument for anyone but the direct witnesses, seeing as it would be anecdotal only. This holds true, by the way, for any of the miraculous gifts.

But textually, scripturally, it seems to me there is no clear or definitive cut off. Scripture itself simply does not describe the total end of all revelatory gifts. It does not describe the close of the canon of Scripture within itself. This is something we assume in God’s providence (and even most Charismatics make a distinction in the degree of authority between the canon of Scripture and the nature of the content of revelatory gifts.)

An important caveat in this regard must be made in 1 Corinthians 13. Paul is not speaking about these revelatory gifts in the abstract or collective sense. I think James W. Scott, in his fairly recent Westminster Theological Journal article on 1 Corinthians 13, makes an important observation regarding the individual emphasis on the gifts in view:

Once again, we should understand that Paul is talking about these revelatory gifts as possessed by individual believers, not as abstract phenomena. He is not saying that a time is coming in history when these spiritual gifts will disappear from the church. Rather, he wants the Corinthians to understand that if they have these spiritual gifts, the time will come when they will no longer have them. Prophecies, tongues, and knowledge will stop coming to them from God. Indeed, the prophecies, tongues, and knowledge that they already have will come to an end. This perspective is required by the comparison [de] with love in v. 8, which, as we have seen, refers to the love that is in individual hearts. Love will not come to an end in one’s personal experience, but these revelatory gifts will.

This interpretation is confirmed by Paul’s manner of referring to the three revelatory gifts. What the ESV translates as “As for . . . as for . . . as for . . .” in v. 8 is more precisely “If . . . and if . . . and if . . .” [eite . . . eite . . . eite . . .]: “But if there be prophecies . . . and if there be tongues . . . and if there be knowledge . . .” Now Paul and his readers knew perfectly well that these spiritual gifts were in existence. So he cannot be saying, “If the gift of prophecy is present somewhere in the church . . .” Yet commentators have universally (it seems) assumed that Paul is talking about these gifts in just such an abstract sense, which may explain why the ESV (like many other translations) alters the construction so as merely to raise an abstract subject. What we must understand is that Paul is talking about these gifts as present in individual Christians. The possibilities implied by “if” are that any particular reader may or may not have the gift in question. Paul is saying to his readers, “If you have one of these gifts, the time will come when you will no longer have it. Your prophecies, tongues, and knowledge will come to an end, but jour love will continue.”[2]

I agree in general. I would go a bit further, however, and say that Paul is not even saying prophecies and knowledge “will stop coming to them” at some single point in the future even as individuals. Even Paul’s strongest timing statements—“but when the perfect comes, the partial will [future] pass away” (13:10), and “now . . . then . . .” twice in verse 12—need not be taken literally, at least not in the sense of predictive time statements. They are, as is more fitting with the literary nature whole passage, speaking upon the backdrop theme of growth and Christian maturity. Arriving at the mature perfection of love is simply not something that changes abruptly, overnight, and is not triggered by any one-time, abrupt event. These contrasting time indicators merely serve as a contrast for two general states of being that would be separated in time during a period of growth.

Put in a way a little more harmonious with Scott’s point, Paul does not have in view here some single event or abrupt change (my point) that does away with all revelatory gifts as a collective gift taken as an abstract whole (Scott’s point). Rather, Paul is simply contrasting a time of childishness with a time of maturity. Putting himself in the shoes of the Corinthian “babies,” that childish time was “now,” and the time of perfection/maturity would be at some point in the future (assuming the Corinthians would embrace the “better way” which Paul had told them). Paul had no idea and gave no indicator of how long that growth period might be, and he also gives no indication of how it comes about.

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Thus the Scriptural support for the view that the revelatory gifts may still be operational today is simply that they are listed as gifts multiple times, and there is no clear Scriptural indication that they as gifts in general will end.

But the most important lesson here is the very lesson we’ve just reviewed in 1 Corinthians 13, indeed the whole letter. That is, God desires us to have Christian maturity reflecting in Christian ethics and Christian works far more than to exercise these spiritual gifts. With the understanding we’ve gained here, we can see that perfection—love—essentially nullifies the need for further revelatory gifts for that individual. The closer one gets to genuine spiritual maturity, the less one should be involved in revelatory gifts. This is precisely the meaning of Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 13.

(Readers must be careful not to affirm the consequent here automatically. Just because a perfected person has no need of extra-revelatory manifestations does not mean that all people who do not engage in revelatory gifts have therefore arrived at perfection. Classic fallacy.)

By no means am I saying I support the modern Charismatic movement in general, and certainly not in all of its permutations, many of which I consider bizarre, misguided, degrading, shameful, and even blasphemous. I only think we have not yet arrived at the clearest scriptural understanding of those gifts, and the frequent misuse of 1 Corinthians 13 in this regard is indicative of that.

1. See Spence and Exell, The Pulpit Commentary, Bickersteth, St. Mark (New York and London: Funk and Wagnalls, 1913), I:333.
2. James W. Scott, “The Time When Revelatory Gifts Cease” (1 Cor. 13:8–12),” Westminster Theological Journal 72 (2012):275. I have transliterated the Greek font in Scott’s original.

Materialistic determinism sounds like a big word. But it is a simple concept, although it has a very strong influence on our modern philosophy and social sciences. All it means is that the moral, cultural, intellectual, vocational choices of man are determined by material factors. Men are not what they are because of their commitment to ideas and faith; they are what they are because something material outside or inside of them makes them be what they are. This is the essence of materialistic determinism. Matter determines.

The crudest and most primitive (“primitive” as in “savage, uncivilized”) form of materialism, of course, is racism. It has existed in different forms among the savage tribes, mainly those who have adopted thoroughly animistic view of the world and nature. The idea that their own tribe is exceptional because it came from a specific ancestor – ironically, very often an animal ancestor – was common among many Native American tribes. The Indian caste system was based on the materialistic assumptions that man was determined by his genes. Even in the modern world, and even among those today who claim to be “Christians,” this philosophical materialism of racism can sometimes find favorable soil. The belief that genes produce culture, or ethics, or art, or anything else, has had and still has a hold on the mind of the fallen man.

The Enlightenment was heavily motivated by philosophical materialism. While the main thinkers of the Enlightenment rejected the materialistic explanations of the universe – most of them were Deists – the majority of those who followed them were materialistic in practice if not in official ideology. Environmental materialism was the norm at the time; the majority of the scientists and scholars – including Voltaire – believed that the culture of men and nations was determined by their geographical and climate conditions.

And of course, the modern form of materialism – and materialistic determinism – which shaped the world in the last one century was Marxism. It has based its argument on a sophisticated form of materialism: the materialism of the economic and social existence. In his early papers, while preparing to write his most important work, Das Kapital, Marx declared that his foundation was materialism:

It is not the consciousness of men that determine their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determine their consciousness.

The very essence of Marx’s view of society followed that materialistic model: society had a base, which was materialistic, the mode of production. The mode of production in its turn was determined by the form of property which had a huge role to play in the Marxist view. And the form of property was determined by the tools of production. At the very base, it was the blind, mindless, impersonal tools of production that determined everything in society. As the tools developed, they needed a new organization of labor, which in turn required a new form of property, which changed the mode of production. On top of that base, there was the superstructure: culture, family, education law, political ideologies, art, literature, science, etc. These all were determined by the social existence of man. Different economic modes of production determined different ideas of politics, art, family, etc. And, remember, it all started from the tools of production. Sophisticated materialism, but materialism nevertheless. And it was so attractive to the masses; the same masses that centuries before it would believe that they were what they were because they had originated from an animal, now accepted Marxism’s explanation that they are what they are because of their bank account or their paycheck or because of the price of the house they lived in.

Materialism is a trap. And many fall in it.

Charles Murray is most certainly not a Marxist. In fact, he is a fairly conservative author, with some very good contributions to the conservative thinking in the US. I should probably say, neo-conservative, since he differs from the true paleo-conservative thinkers in a few significant areas. And the think-tank he is working for, The American Enterprise Institute, is rather neo-conservative too in its orientation. But one must admit, they have done quite a job in defending free markets, individual liberty, and limited government. The conclusions and the policy recommendations they have given have always been opposed to socialism and any other form of big government.

And yet, even Charles Murray is not immune to the temptation to resort to philosophical materialism when he tries to explain the world, society, culture, or the issues of the day.

In a recent article, “The New American Divide,” Murray worries about what he calls “the problem of cultural inequality.” People are divided in classes in America, he says, and these classes are divided economically and geographically. There are people who are rich and getting richer. And there are people who are poor. The rich separate themselves in their own neighborhoods; the poor remain in their lower-middle-class, blue-collar workers’ neighborhoods. This separation causes sharp cultural separation, he says, and he uses statistical data to prove it. He uses five statistical points to prove that there is such a divide: marriage (percentage of people who are legally married), single parenthood (percentage of children born out of wedlock), industriousness (percentage of males out of the labor force), crime rate, and religiosity (measured inversely by the percentage of people who profess to be secular). Murray discovers serious differences which makes him conclude that these are two sharply different cultures.

This divide is what worries him. He says that just a generation ago there wasn’t such a divide, that there was this unified culture called “the American way of life,” which is now being lost. There is no such thing as a unified “American way of life” now. The two cultures, which he symbolically calls Belmont (the rich) and Fishtown (the poor) are moving apart from each other in everything. Murray says:

Taken separately, the differences in lifestyle that now separate Belmont from Fishtown are not sinister, but those quirks of the upper-middle class that I mentioned—the yogurt and muesli and the rest—are part of a mosaic of distinctive practices that have developed in Belmont. These have to do with the food Belmonters eat, their drinking habits, the ages at which they marry and have children, the books they read (and their number), the television shows and movies they watch (and the hours spent on them), the humor they enjoy, the way they take care of their bodies, the way they decorate their homes, their leisure activities, their work environments and their child-raising practices. Together, they have engendered cultural separation.

And of course, here comes that most awful of all differences, the median income. In the 1960s, the average income in Belmont was $84,000 (today’s purchasing power). Today it is $163,000. The gap is widening, Murray says, and this creates a problem for America.

Even at just a first glance, though, Murray’s concerns seem to be a little out of place. Even the statistical averages – and he uses only statistical averages, not concrete data – don’t show such a sharp difference. Some people in Belmont do live like the people in Fishtown; and some people in Fishtown live like the people in Belmont. Provided, of course, that we take “the yogurt and the muesli and the rest” as our standard for “different cultures.” Statistical differences are not always clear, and they can be misinterpreted; or they can be based on a peculiar choice of “cultural distinctives” that the study has adopted as a base. There were differences between rich and poor in the past, although not the same as today. In the not so distant past, the differences were in the number of TVs a home had (Murray assumes that all had TVs in their homes) or in the toys the children played with, or in the brand of cigarettes that Dad smoked. Before that the differences were in the type of car a family had – or whether it had a car. Or whether the family lived in the slums or had its own house. Etc., etc. These differences have always been around, they only change with every generation. In fact, it is safe to say that the toys for the rich in one generation become commonplace for the poor in the next generation – provided, of course, that a society continues encouraging innovation and private enterprise. The rich only had cars; then everyone had a car (or several, today). The rich only had TVs; then everyone had a TV (and several flatscreens today). The rich only played golf; everyone plays golf today (unless they like other sports). “The yogurt and the muesli and the rest” will tomorrow enter Fishtown – if they haven’t entered it already. (Our local Walmart has been increasing its section of “organic foods” for the last several years; and there are no “superZIPs” around.)

Not to mention the fact that in between Belmont and Fishtown there are thousands of neighborhoods and ZIPs that are only a small notch apart from each other in the social ladder that Murray describes. I live in such a neighborhood, called Copperfield. It is not Belmont, certainly, but it isn’t Fishtown either. And the vast majority of Americans do live in such neighborhoods as mine. The gap between Belmont and Fishtown, after all, is filled with millions of Americans who live in Copperfields; so there is no gap at all.

And there are many other objections that can be brought up against Murray’s description of the “cultural divide.” It’s either not a divide at all, or it is just normal, as it has always been around.

But there is a greater problem with Murray’s thesis. And it is not in his conclusions but in his premises. Murray’s presuppositions are thoroughly materialistic. He sees the “cultural divide” between Fishtown and Belmont as engendered by the difference in the incomes. In this, he is not different from Marx, or any other modern materialistic determinist: Murray believes that the social status of a person determines their cultural choice. This is Marx’s thesis as well. Marx, having based his entire philosophy on the concept of “economic class,” has never been able to define what that “economic class” might be. The concept the way Marx wanted it, presupposed a lack of social mobility for the individuals. But the reality – especially in the days of free-market capitalism in Britain and the US, and even on the Continent, in the 19th century – was that people who were born as part of the “working class” always had the opportunity to apply their skills to the market in a way that would raise them to the position of being “capitalists.” Some capitalists went bankrupt and became wage-earners. In order to define “class” and defend his thesis of the “class war” and “exploitation,” Marx needed to explain that social mobility away. He never found a way.

Murray is smarter than Marx. He still bases his analysis on the materialistic presupposition that social status determines cultural choice but he also explain how a person gets to end up in Belmont or in Fishtown:

To be assigned to Belmont, the people in the statistical nationwide databases on which I am drawing must have at least a bachelor’s degree and work as a manager, physician, attorney, engineer, architect, scientist, college professor or content producer in the media. To be assigned to Fishtown, they must have no academic degree higher than a high-school diploma. If they work, it must be in a blue-collar job, a low-skill service job such as cashier, or a low-skill white-collar job such as mail clerk or receptionist.

People are “assigned,” and then choose their culture. Your cultural choice is determined by your degree. College education assigns you to Belmont; and thus, assigns you to have “upper class” cultural choices: traditional family, industriousness, less proneness to crime, and more religiosity. Culture is defined by education; or, put it another way, education is the solution to the cultural problems. The more education, the better people are, more faithful to their spouses, more honest, hard working, and religious. It’s that easy.

Except that the Soviet Union had an abundance of university graduates, and the culture was a complete failure.

Of course, Murray is not so foolish to believe that college education in itself determines the cultural choice. That would be too simplistic. His article is written only in the context of his whole work so far. In 1994 he co-authored a book with the Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein: The Bell Curve. The subtitle of the book declared the thesis of the book: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. At the end of the day, Herrnstein and Murray concluded, it is the IQ that separates people into different social and economic classes. And by separating them into these different classes, it separates them into different cultures. The authors claimed that IQ determines – at least there is a “statistical correlation” – such cultural choices and characteristics like the age at which people marry, or whether they divorce, or whether they are religious or not, or how many children they have, or whether they have illegitimate children, or commit crimes, etc. Culture and cultural choices are defined by intelligence, the authors claim; there is statistical evidence for it.

Throughout the whole book, though, Herrnstein and Murray did not explain how some people get to have higher intelligence and some people get to have lower intelligence. Obviously, people are “assigned” to their intelligence level: in the Introduction, the authors claim that intelligence remains fairly constant throughout the life of an individual. It is not a matter of choice; it is something you either have or not have. Since it is not a matter of will and commitment, then it must be the result of some material causes in man. But what are these causes? The authors don’t say. They only vaguely mumble in a few places that apparently intelligence has something to do with genes and inheritance; but they are not positive. (This statement was what made the book very controversial in the mid-1990s, not the overall philosophical commitment to materialistic determinism, which is the greater flaw of the book.) The authors don’t know what intelligence really is but they refuse to accept that it has to do with the self-conscious choice and commitment of a person. It must be materially determined. And whatever it is, they can detect it through IQ tests, SAT/ACT scores, etc. In fact, since so few people in the last century were tested directly for IQ, the authors rely heavily on SAT/ACT scores to determine IQ. And then, of course, IQ produces college degrees. And then, college degrees determine cultural choices.

There is one problem, though.

There is a group in the society, small enough to be very distinct from the other groups, but large enough to create statistical problems for Murray’s thesis, which completely destroys his case. Murray avoids even mentioning that group. That group wasn’t that large back in the 1990s, and yet it was fairly well represented in all the states, and statistics about it were already available. In 2012, when Murray writes his article, this group is everywhere, and the top colleges in this country – the same colleges that are an important part of Murray’s study – compete to get children from that group.

Homeschoolers.

No matter what genetic, educational, cultural, geographic background homeschoolers come from, they consistently score way above their peers from public and private schools when it comes to SAT, ACT, admission tests in colleges and universities, or any other “intelligence” tests out there. By Murray’s standards, this will mean a heavy concentration of intelligence in the significant minority of homeschoolers. Since people can not produce intelligence by choice and commitment – this is Murray’s materialistic thesis – then he must conclude that homeschooling is the cultural choice of parents who are already very intelligent and transfer their intelligence to their children.

But this is not the case. All statistics show that the test results of homeschooled children have zero correlation to (that is, they do not depend on) the intelligence, social status, educational background, genetic stock, or any other material or inherited factor of the parents. Homeschoolers are just more intelligent than the others but there is no identifiable reason why, if one is looking for some material factor. The son of a farmer and the son of a lawyer perform equally well – very well, way above their peers – and no one knows why. The children of “lower class” families compete against children of college professors and CEOs, and do very well, sometimes even better. As if the IQ of the nation has been concentrated in those only who have decided to homeschool their children.

Murray’s materialistic determinism fails here. That’s why he never mentions homeschoolers in his studies. They do not fit the mold of materialistic determinism.

What’s the truth? Murray has it upside down when it comes to understanding the factors that determine culture. It is not the college degrees, or not even the mysterious IQ that make people decide whether to be more faithful to their spouses, or be more religious, or commit less crimes, or eat muesli and yogurt. It’s the other way around: The religious, moral, and cultural commitment of a person determines whether they will apply their mind, skills, and efforts to useful work, and whether they will be faithful to their family, their employer, or whether they will save money and move to a better neighborhood, etc. The material, economic, and social status of a man as well as his intellectual skills, they all depend on his self-discipline and his self-conscious decision to have a long-term commitment. Self-restraint and industriousness are what make a man well off. The homeschoolers who always score high at SAT/ACT are not genetically superior; they are morally committed to excellence; and that’s why they demonstrate excellent results.

“Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life” (Pr. 4:23). The heart of a man is the source of all his cultural and moral and intellectual choices. Murray has based his studies on a philosophy hostile to the Bible. That’s why, at the end of the article, his solutions are simply bare  moralism, an appeal to the denizens of Belmont to adopt some undefined “civic virtues,” while he condescendingly claims that “doing that in Fishtown requires support from outside.” At the end, his solution denigrates the poor to a condition of dependents. It won’t work. It is the same conclusion as would have come from a leftist liberal, even if Murray tries to dress it in the garb of voluntarism. Materialistic determinism inevitably leads to the wrong conclusions.

What America needs is not another moralistic appeal to undefined “civic virtues.” What it needs is something which will appeal to the source of the springs of life. That something is the faith upon which America was founded in the first place: Christianity. Only a resurgence of Christianity – a culturally active, comprehensive Christianity, applied to every area of life and action – will help cure the problems Murray has noticed. Without such appeal to the heart, no change in the behavior in Belmont, and no amount of outside help to Fishtown would achieve anything. Materialistic determinism, whether conservative or liberal, is a fallacy, and it will always produce the wrong practical results.

The following article is a follow-up to “Are Lobbying, Rallying Voters, Organizing Protests, and Harnessing the Evangelical Movement UnChristian?,” a response to Phil Johnson’s “Salt of the Earth” article that was published in the January 2012 issue of Tabletalk magazine.

Our duty as citizens is to see that civil government stays within its jurisdictional boundaries. This is exactly what Paul did when he questioned the authority of a Roman civil official regarding his rights as a Roman citizen (Acts 22:23–30).

“But when [the Roman soldiers] stretched him out with thongs, Paul said to the centurion who was standing by, ‘Is it lawful for you to scourge a man who is a Roman and uncondemned?’”

If it was right for Paul to “protest” this single violation of his rights as a Roman citizen, why is it wrong to protest constitutional violations given the fact that Constitution itself gives us the right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances”?

Phil Johnson is mismanaging the comprehensiveness of the Bible’s message to speak to all of life by limiting the meaning of holy living to personal holiness. Holy living is not a narrow enterprise. It encompasses all of life. The British poet and literary critic T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) makes the point better than I can:

[T]here is an aspect in which we can see a religion as the whole way of life of a people, from birth to the grave, from morning to night and even in sleep, and that way of life is also its culture. . . . The dominant force in creating a common culture between peoples each of which has its distinct culture, is religion. . . . I am not so much concerned with the communion of Christian believers today; I am talking about the common tradition of Christianity which has made Europe what it is, and about the common cultural elements which this common Christianity has brought with it. . . .

It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe have — until recently — been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. . . . If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes.”[1]

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There’s no single verse that addresses politics or anything else. The entire Bible speaks to the subject of politics just like it speaks to everything else. Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920), Prime Minister of the Netherlands and Professor of Theology at the Free University of Amsterdam, summarized this truth with these words: “[N]o single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: “Mine!’”[2]

If holiness means “Thou Shalt not steal” for you and me, then it also means the same thing for you and me if we decide to become a civil official – a “minister of God” – as Paul puts it. Politics, actually “civil government,” is not morally neutral territory just like self-government, family government, and church government are not morally neutral. If we follow Johnson’s reasoning, we can’t speak out against a civil minister when he violates his oath to uphold the Constitution.  Would we do the same with a husband who violates his marriage oath or a minister of the gospel who violates his ordination vows? Of course we wouldn’t. There are procedures to deal with these violations. The same is true in the civil realm. In includes organizing people to oppose civil oath violators to remove them from office.

Johnson continues:

Jesus blessed people who were willing to be oppressed and disenfranchised for righteousness’ sake — peacemakers, not protesters; poor in spirit, not proud; people who are persecuted, not the pompous and power-mongers.

So if thugs break into Johnson’s home and burn it down, what should he do? What if they beat and rape his wife and steal all his stuff? If the chief of police and the mayor don’t do anything about it, is Johnson telling Christians that they should not protest but just take the persecution “for righteousness’ sake”? Would he be considered “proud,” “pompous” and a “power monger” to rally his neighbors to vote the mayor out of office in the next election? The civil magistrate has the power of the sword. Without limits on the civil minister’s authority and power, that sword can do a lot of harm to a lot of people.

The civil magistrate is a “minister of God” — a civil deacon (diakonos) — for our good (Rom. 13:4). The Jews in Jesus’ day did not have access to the avenues of governmental change. They could not operate in terms of their law (e.g., John 18:31). They lost their governing authority a long time ago and were under God’s judgment. They lost that authority because they remained silent when their religious and civil rulers rejected the ordinances of God.

I suppose as Christians like Corrie ten Boom (1893–1983) and her family were being dragged off to the concentration camp for helping Jews escape from the Nazis, their fellow-Christians should have told them, “This is what you get for not being willing to be oppressed and disenfranchised for righteousness’ sake. You should have made peace with the Nazis not protest against them. Persecution is the Christian’s lot in life.”

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If Christians had been involved in government decades before, Germany would never have had an Adolf Hitler. In 19^th-century Germany, a distinction was made between the realm of public policy managed by the State and the domain of private morality under the province of the gospel. Religion was the sphere of the inner personal life, while things public came under the jurisdiction of the “worldly powers.” Redemption was fully the province of the church while the civil sphere was solely the province of the State. “Religion was a private matter that concerned itself with the personal and moral development of the individual. The external order — nature, scientific knowledge, statecraft — operated on the basis of its own internal logic and discernable laws.”[3] Christians were told that the church’s sole concern was the spiritual life of the believer. “The Erlangen church historian Hermann Jorda declared in 1917 that the state, the natural order of God, followed its own autonomous laws while the kingdom of God was concerned with the soul and operated separately on the basis of the morality of the gospel.”[4] Sound familiar? Here’s a sample of some German theological thinking that shaped the mind‑set of the nation and brought Hitler to power:

• Christian Ernst Luthard wrote in 1867: “The Gospel has absolutely nothing to do with outward existence but only with eternal life, not with external orders and institutions which could come in conflict with the secular orders but only with the heart and its relationship with God. . . . It is not the vocation of Jesus Christ or of the Gospel to change the orders of secular life and establish them anew. . . . Christianity wants to change man’s heart, not his external situation.”[5]
• Rudolf Sohm (1841–1917), speaking to a convention on the main Christian social action group, the Inner Mission, asserted: “The Gospel frees us from this world, frees us from all questions of this world, frees us inwardly, also from the questions of public life, also from the social question. Christianity has no answer to these questions.” The issues of public life, he wrote, “should remain untouched by the proclamation of the Gospel, completely untouched.”[6])
• Wilhelm Hermann declared in the 1913 edition of his book on ethics that the state was a product of nature and that it could not be love but only self‑assertion, coercion, and law. . . . Once the Christian understood the moral significance of the state, then “he will consider obedience to the government to be the highest vocation within the state. For the authority of the state on the whole, resting as it does upon authority of the government, is more important than the elimination of any shortcomings which it might have.”

America had its own affair with a hands-off approach. Congressman Wilson Lumpkin (1783–1870) argued that Christians should stay out of the controversy regarding removing the Cherokee Indians from Georgia in what has become known as the “Trail of Tears”:

“[Lumpkin] decried those Christians who left their proper realm and sought to involve themselves in politics as ‘canting fanatics.’ He said he had no trouble with ‘pure religion’ (that is, religion that steered clear of politics), ‘but the undefiled religion of the Cross is a separate and distinct thing in its nature from the noisy cant of the pretenders who have cost this Government, since the commencement of the present session of Congress, considerably upwards of $100,000 by their various intermeddlings with the political concerns of the country.’”[7]

Liberals and conservatives alike would be horrified at Lumpkin’s claim of religious and moral neutrality if it had been used to overlook the horrors of slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and ethnic cleansing. But the argument is still being used.

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I’ve gone on long enough. There’s a book about this subject somewhere. Actually, I already wrote it: Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths: How Misreading the Bible Neutralizes Christians.

1. T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948).
2. Abraham Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty” (1880) in James D. Bratt, ed., Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 488.
3. Richard V. Pierard, “Why Did Protestants Welcome Hitler?,” Fides et Historia (North Newton, KS: The Conference on Faith and History), X:2 (Spring 1978), 13.
4. Pierard, “Why Did Protestants Welcome Hitler?,” 14.
5. Quoted in Carl E. Braaten, Principles of Lutheran Theology, 2^nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 152.
6. Quoted in Carl E. Braaten, Principles of Lutheran Theology, 152. Robert Benne makes the following good points on the effects of this type of thinking: “There are two serious theological problems here. For one, the affirmation of the Sovereign God as Creator, Sustainer, and Judge of all is forgotten. The God whose will is revealed in the commandments and in his involvement in history is somehow expunged from the political world. Along with this denial of God’s involvement in history is the elevation of the gospel to such a height that it has no relevance to ordinary life. The gospel addresses only the inner man about eternal life, not the whole man who is embedded in God’s history.” (Good and Bad Ways to Think about Religion and Politics [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010], 22.
7. Quoted in John Wilson, “Why Evangelicals Can’t Opt Out of Political Engagement,” Books & Culture (July 15, 2002), www.christianitytoday.com/books/features/bccorner/020715.html. See John G. West, Jr, The Politics of Revelation and Reason: Religion and Civic Life in the New (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1996).

There is a reason we call the revelation given to us from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22 the “Bible.” The Greek word biblos (βίβλος) — from which we get the English word Bible — means “book.” The Bible is one book even though it has 66 (39 + 27) individual parts.

No single verse can be properly explained and understood without considering it in the light of the whole Bible. No verse can or should stand on its own. For example, the Hebrew word el and the Greek word theos are translated “god” in the Bible. Without a whole-Bible context, they can refer to pagan gods (Deut. 10:17) or Satan himself (2 Cor. 4:4). You only know the difference by studying the immediate context and the context of the whole Bible.

I bring this up because of the article “The Salt of the Earth” written by Phil Johnson for the January 2012 edition of Tabletalk magazine published by Ligonier Ministries. Johnson begins his article by citing the following verses:

“You are the salt of the earth… . You are the light of the world… . Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 5:13–16).

Then he offers these comments:

That text is often cited as if it were a mandate for the church to engage in political activism — lobbying, rallying voters, organizing protests, and harnessing the evangelical movement for political clout. I recently heard a well-known evangelical leader say, “We need to make our voices heard in the voting booth, or we’re not being salt and light the way Jesus commanded.”

That view is pervasive. Say the phrase “salt and light,” and the typical evangelical starts talking politics as if by Pavlovian reflex.

But look at Jesus’ statement carefully in its context. He was not drumming up boycotts, protests, or a political campaign. He was calling His disciples to holy living.

Let’s take Johnson’s comment that Jesus was “calling His disciples to holy living.” A good point that we can agree on. Where do we go to find out about holy living and how broad and comprehensive holy living is? Does it include politics, economics, raising children, church life, walking your dog, crossing the street, playing baseball, teaching a Sunday school class, pasturing a church, doing evangelism, creating music and art, developing a computer program?

Johnson can’t say from the verses he cited since Jesus doesn’t give any details. Nothing is included or left out. Johnson is reading into the verses things that aren’t there. Or I should say that he is leaving out items that are found elsewhere in Scripture.

The writer to the Hebrews does something similar. He tells his readers that by this point in their Christian walk they should be “teachers,” they “need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God,” needing “milk and not solid food” (Heb. 5:13). He goes on to write that it’s through practice that their senses are trained to “discern good and evil” (5:14). Like Jesus’ words in the portion of the Sermon on the Mount that Johnson references, there are no particulars. There is no need for them, since earlier he wrote the following:

For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart (Heb. 4:12).

There is nothing in this passage that indicates that the realm of politics – civil government – is excluded since the when the whole Bible is read, there is a great deal said about the subject. This is supported by the apostle Paul in his letter to Timothy:

All Scripture is God breathed and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. (2 Tim. 3:16–17).

Of course, as we read on in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus mentions a number of moral particulars, but these three chapters do not exhaust what it means to live a holy life, especially when we read the above passages in Hebrews and 2 Timothy.

Why can’t we shine the bright light of all of God’s Word (Ps. 119:105) on the world — including civil government (“a minister of God”: Rom. 13:1–7) — like we do for self-government (“self-control”: Prov. 25:28), church government (“an overseer must be above reproach”: 1 Tim. 3:2), business (“just weights and measures”: Lev. 19:36), journalism (“do not bear false witness”: Ex. 20:16), and everything else in life?

Consider these words from John MacArthur. I’m bringing MacArthur into the discussion because Johnson is the executive Director of Grace to You, a Christian tape and radio ministry that features the preaching ministry of John MacArthur. Phil Johnson has been closely associated with MacArthur since 1981 and edits most of MacArthur’s major books. The following is from “You Are the Light of the World,” a sermon that MacArthur preached on Matthew 5:14–16:

I think God wants us to confront the world. Just because the world persecutes us, reviles us, and says all manner of evil against us falsely, just because it seems impossible that, in a country where the Constitution says no law could ever be passed that takes away any of the freedom of religion at all from anybody, we’re facing the fact that you can’t have a Bible study in your house without a permit. I really don’t think that it will get any easier. I don’t think that just because the world makes it tough on us that we should crawl in a hole or keep our mouths shut or hide. We should be like verse 13 [of Matt. 5], salt and light in the world.

MacArthur references the Constitution and that its original purpose was that “no law could ever be passed that takes away” anyone’s freedom of religion. This seems to be a reference to the First Amendment. How did the First Amendment get into the Constitution? It was Christians who worked for it. They weren’t satisfied with the text of the Constitution as it was drafted in 1787, so they pushed for a Bill of Rights to limit the power and authority of the newly constituted national civil government even more than the Constitution itself did.

The First Amendment is a political statement designed to keep Congress from interfering with religion at the state level. Following Johnson’s logic, Christians who lobbied for a constitutional provision that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” was, to us his words, “lording it over” people, exercising “political dominion,” and making “society righteous through legislation.”

I suspect that most people would praise our Christian founders for putting into law the protections listed in the First Amendment to insure that churches can speak, write, and assemble about religion (all found in the amendment). That same First Amendment also gives citizens the right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.” Might not that include “boycotts, protests, or a political campaign”?

We’re not subjects to Rome. “Render to Caesar the things that belong to Caesar” (Matt. 22) only applies to us in principle since we don’t live under Caesar. If anything, the Constitution is our Caesar, and it gives us the right and responsibility to boycott, protest, and campaign to change our government by changing those elected to office who violate their oath of office and legislate contrary to the Constitution.

People like Phil Johnson are living off borrowed capital. They denounce Christian involvement in politics but reap the benefits of generations of Christians that made it possible for them to enjoy the freedoms they have in this nation to preach the gospel unhindered. If we lose that freedom, it will be because Christians like Johnson and those who share his philosophy advise the church that to push for certain legislative remedies is an attempt to make “society righteous through legislation.”

That’s like saying working to pass a law to make buying and selling slaves illegal is an attempt to make society righteous through legislation. The purpose of the law is to protect people from being bought and sold. Must we wait for the nation to become righteous before such a law is passed? Not according to the Bible:

But we know that the Law is good, if one uses it lawfully, realizing the fact that law is not made for a righteous man, but for those who are lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers and immoral men and homosexuals and kidnappers and liars and perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound teaching, according to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, with which I have been entrusted (1 Tim. 1:8–11).

If everybody had to be righteous before a law was passed, we could never pass a law and slavery might still be legal. The passage and enforcement of laws keep most unrighteous people from acting out their unrighteousness because they know that painful sanctions are meted out for law breakers.

This is not to say that all immorality can be curtailed by passing laws or that there should be a law for every unrighteous deed. Even the Bible doesn’t go that far. Prohibition is an example of trying to remedy a lack of self-control through legislation. By biblical standards drunkenness is a sin, but there is no call in the Bible to legislate against drinking alcohol.

I’ll conclude my comments tomorrow.

[A rush manuscript, to fulfill a promise. Please report any typos to joel@americanvision.org.]

“Behold, I make all things new,” says the Enthroned One of Revelation 21. What did He mean by this announcement of a totally new creation?

One of the most misunderstood and misapplied themes in all of Scripture is that of “new heavens and new earth” mentioned in Revelation 21:1 and 2 Peter 3:13. Peter wrote “we are waiting” (v. 13) for this reality, and many Christians think this is the case still for today: Christians are waiting for the appearing of the Lord, a final cataclysmic judgment of the world, and then a new heavens and new earth.

In the studies which follow, I am going to tell you why this is almost entirely incorrect.

The Promise of His Appearing

(See here for the previous exegetical work on 2 Peter 3:1-13.)

Different Worlds, Same Word

Peter’s answer to the scoffers (of 2 Peter 3:3–4) is notable in many ways, particularly in what it implies about the nature of the judgment—both in general and for what Peter’s audience should have expected in their episode. The relevant passages say,

For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly (2 Pet. 3:5–7).

First, there are translational issues here. I don’t like the ESV (above) here, nor am I happy with any one popular translation that’s out there. Considering that punctuation and verse divisions came much later than the earliest manuscripts, and looking at the overall message Peter is trying to give (that is, a parallel between the certainty of the prophesied judgment of Noah’s flood and that of Jesus’ prophesied return in judgment), I think verses 5–7 could better be translated like this:

For they willingly ignore this: that heavens existed long ago, and land out of water and with water gathered together, by the word of God the world at that time perished, being flooded with water; and the present heavens and the earth by the same word, are being reserved for fire, kept unto a day of judgment and destruction of godless men.

While this is not a noticeably large difference, the key thing of interest here is the parallel of the two certain judgments being effected by the same Word of God. During the flood, the “world at that time” suffered judgment “by the word of God”; this was for Peter enough to refute the scoffers’ view that all things continued the same since the beginning of creation. But since the same God and the same Word also now pronounced judgment coming upon “the present heavens and earth” (of Peter’s day, before the AD 70 destruction of Jerusalem), then the scoffers were equally wrong for questioning this time as they were about ignoring the history of Noah. Translating the verse this way brings to the fore the eternal reliability of the Word of God despite and against the claims of godless men, the scoffers. Peter is not trying to spin some arcane theory of creation here, he is simply reemphasizing the trustworthiness of the “sure Word of prophecy” (1:19) in judgment, for this simple fact alone overturns the scoffers’ view of both history and the near future.

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Second, there is both interplay and distinction between “heavens and earth” and “world” here which shows the two are not necessarily to be considered equivalent, although not mutually exclusive either. This means there is flexibility and overlap in how these phrases are understood and applied, and contexts will play a role in determining how they are used.

The heavens existed from long ago, and the earth standing out of and with the water. This “heavens and earth” is a clear reference to the themes developed in Genesis 1:1–10, which includes the separation of waters and earth beneath the heavens, and the gathering of the waters together.

(There may be some semantic relation between the Septuagint’s sustema (“gathering”) of the waters and Peter’s usage of sunestoma (“standing together”), which I translated interpretively as “gathered together,” in regard to the land and water. There should be further study of the etymology and usage of these two words. There should be some focus given to how closely Peter came to the Septuagint of Genesis 1 here.)

Interestingly, the heaven and earth, land and sea described here are not the subjects of judgment during the flood, per Peter, but rather the water of that creation was the agent which does the flooding; and it floods not the land or earth (ge in Greek) specifically, but the kosmos at the time. This indicates at least some linguistic distinction between the physical elements of creation per se, and perhaps even as a whole—“heavens and earth”—and some other way of understanding the totality of what God used those elements to judge, here called kosmos. In short, kosmos is not necessarily exactly the same as the “heavens and earth,” nor vice versa.

At this point we must be quick to note that Peter does seem to use the two categories interchangeably. In verse 6, speaking of the old world before the flood, judgment comes via the creation upon the kosmos that existed at the time. But in Peter’s reapplication of that certainty to his own time, judgment was about to fall upon “the present heavens and earth.” So there seems to be at least some interchangeability in the terms. To the extent that there is, both terms can have flexibility to be understood sometimes metaphorically, representatively, typologically, and at other times literally. However much their penumbrae of meaning may overlap, Peter’s presentation of the two judgments as parallel examples of God’s reliable advance of righteousness in the earth expects us to accept significant if not total overlap in this place. And while I do not think they are technically identical by any means, Peter’s parallelism is clear (I paraphrase):

The world [kosmos] of that time perished by the Word of God (v. 6)

The heavens and earth of this time will be destroyed by the same Word of God (v. 7)

Yet since the “world”—as in the physical heavens and earth—of Noah was not literally “destroyed” and was not literally replaced by a new physical world after the flood, we need not necessarily assume that Peter is looking for a total physical change in the planet in His time either. There would certainly be a physical aspect in the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, just as there was in the physical flood of Noah; but the death of the old world and the birth of the new need not itself to be understood as a purely physical transformation. This is primarily a covenantal change which carries with it certain limited physical transformations.

The long story short, here, is that God’s covenantal judgments—however extensive and severe—at different times can delineate different “worlds” before and after, as well as different “heavens and earths” before and after, while not necessarily being understood as literally as possible. There was an “old world” along with a “heavens” that “existed long ago” which perished in the flood, and there was a “present heavens and earth” which were about to be destroyed in Peter’s time to make way for a new heavens and new earth which Peter and his audience “expected” as we shall see. Yet during none of these judgments was the physical creation completely obliterated and replaced. The change from “old” to “new” in each case had limited physical applications which pertained to God’s covenants with man, judgment on wicked men, and the preservation of God’s elect into the new world. Thus there are multiple applications of “world” and of “heavens and earth” which we ignore at our peril.

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While this begs for a much more diverse study than I can pretend to offer here, the immediate application to 2 Peter 3 should be obvious: the heavens and earth about to be destroyed by no means necessarily refer to a destruction of the physical heavens and physical earth. Peter and his audience have something much simpler, though just as profound, in mind for this event. There was a destruction of the “present heavens and earth” coming in their lifetimes, after which they expected a new heavens and new earth,” and both of these expectations were built directly upon the teachings of Jesus.

Heavens and earth will pass away

We have established a close connection between Peter’s letters and Jesus’ eschatological predictions. This is particularly true of Matthew 24:34—“this generation”—as we saw. In this context, too, we should emphasize Jesus’ very next words in Matthew 24:35: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” These are obviously connected to the same predictions of Jesus. They also correlate directly to Peter’s “new heavens and a new earth.”

But what did Jesus mean “heaven and earth will pass away”? On the surface, this appears to be merely some kind of figure of speech to emphasize the invincibility of God’s Word compared to even the entire universe; but we should rethink this. Is it not the case, rather, that it is directly connected to the idea of a new heaven and earth about to come in the same time frame as the destruction Jesus just predicted. Indeed, seen from this viewpoint, Jesus was promising the passing of the present heaven and earth and the creation of a new heaven and earth in the lifetime of those listening to Him. And this is exactly the issue which Peter takes up in 2 Peter 3.

This connection is not only thematic, but literary also. Jesus’ word for “pass away” [pareleusetai] is repeated by Peter: “the heavens will pass away [pareleusontai] with a roar.” Peter is again applying the teaching of Jesus for his audience.

The word in itself does not denote so much a physical disappearance or death (in the way we today euphemize death as “passing away”), but is widely used to refer to passing or passing by in time, event, or physical distance. This is further evidence that the event Peter is describing is not a destruction of the physical planet, but a transition from one type of world order to a new one.

What then is meant by the obviously literal language Peter employs? What about the “heavenly bodies” and “all these things” being “dissolved,” the heavens being “set on fire and dissolved,” etc.? There is no good reason to take these literally in this case. There are good reasons not to, in fact:

First, to think that the literal “heavenly bodies” will literally “be burned up and dissolved” is nonsensical. Since “heavenly bodies” is held distinct from “the heavens” here, the phrase cannot refer to the heavens of the earth’s atmosphere (which could, technically, burn away and dissolve). If “heavenly bodies” is to be taken literally, it must refer to stars, planets, etc. But this presents a literal, physical problem: the vast majority of these heavenly bodies are stars. And what are stars? They are, to be blunt, balls of fire. Is God here saying He intends to destroy balls of fire by burning them with fire? Perhaps the insistent literalist will say God will use the hottest fire imaginable. But then again, stars are not just fire, they are essentially natural nuclear fusion reactors—the hottest temperatures imaginable. Again, is God warning us here that He plans to burn up the hottest temperature imaginable by using the hottest temperatures imaginable? Granted, with God all things are possible, but there seems to be something contradictory and irrational if this language is to be taken literally.

This problem is cleared up quite nicely when we understand this language to be like so many other Scriptures which describe God’s great covenantal judgments in terms of undoing creation (Isa. 13:10–19; 34:1–5; Ezek. 32:2–11; Joel 2:30–31; Matt. 24:29–30, to name a few). Whereas covenant blessing is frequently spoken of in terms of pristine creation language—gardens, rivers of water, abundant fruit, fish, etc.—covenant curses present the opposite: not the abundance of creation, but the undoing of it. This is exactly what we see in Jesus Olivet Discourse, as well as Peter’s instruction in 2 Peter 3.

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Second, the text does not say that the earth will be burned up and dissolved, only the heavenly bodies and the heavens. While the less reliable manuscripts behind the KJV do say the earth and its works will be burned up, the better MS tradition now reads “discovered” instead. While this sounds a bit strange at first, it is actually more biblical. Again, God is not burning up the literal universe here; this is a covenantal judgment destroying the present order of things and ultimately a judgment upon godless men. The burning up and dissolving of the heavens is a metaphorical removal of the heavenly firmament and exposing the godless sinfulness of the polluted land and the works in it—particularly, the faithless Jerusalem which had rejected and murdered Jesus. The godless will be exposed.

This is consistent with images found elsewhere in Scripture, and again during other covenantal judgments. For example, Ezekiel 8 has God giving Ezekiel a tour of the Temple complex, exposing all of the abominations of the Israelite people at the time. God had Ezekiel look through a hole in the wall (Ezek. 8:8) and discover what the Israelites thought they kept well-hidden (see 8:12). God then ordered a slaughter of the Israelites throughout the land. He specifically exempted the faithful and marked them (the elect), and then called for the judgment specifically to “Begin at my house” (Ezek. 9:6).

Now the ultimate symbol of the Old Covenant administration—the “present heavens and earth” of 2 Peter 3—was the Jerusalem Temple. Jesus had clearly predicted it would be destroyed, not one block left upon another (Matt. 24:2). James Jordan and Peter Leithart argue that the Temple was a symbolic “creation” of God, an image of “the heavens and the earth,” and I tend to agree.[1]  This is why the tabernacle/temple was adorned with beasts, lights, trees, fruit, a sea, etc., and separated from the other heavens by a ceiling (firmament), while a veil (again, a firmament) separated God’s presence in the Holy of Holies from everything else. While I do not have the time to develop this completely, let it suffice to say that God was about to destroy this particular heavens and earth literally, and by extension, the entire covenant world-order associated with it.

After Christ came in the flesh (the living tabernacle/temple), the Jews rejected Him, and He finished His work, any continued worship at that Old defunct Temple was rank idolatry in God’s eyes. It was an abomination. Thus Peter’s situation replays almost exactly that of Ezekiel 8ff. A covenantal administration lawsuit was in view, and unbelieving Israel was about to be destroyed for their abominations (rejecting Christ not the least of them), and Peter had even expressly told his readers that judgment must “begin at the household of God” (1 Pet. 4:17; cf. Ezek. 9:5).

God had rent the firmament to expose the land and all the works in it to His holy consuming presence. The godless men—unbelieving Jews—were thus discovered, exposed, and were soon to be destroyed.

Third, the translation “heavenly bodies” is not very supportable here anyway. Both times this phrase appears the Greek word is stoicheia, “basics” or “principles.” The KJV actually went with “elements,” but even this is not quite right if understood as physical elements, earthly elements. In the New Testament, the word is used to refer to principles of the covenant order, often of the Old Testament, to which the people should not want to return (Gal. 4:3, 9; Col. 2:8, 20; cf. Heb. 5:12). In one place, a group of Jews uses the verb form specifically to direct Paul to follow Old Covenant rituals (Acts 21:24). In other places, the verb form refers to a basic discipline of living righteously, by the faith, or by the Spirit (Phil. 3:16; Gal. 5:25; 6:16; Rom. 4:12). This is about all the biblical direction we get, and none of it refers to the heavenly bodies or to the physical elements of the world, earth, heavens, or universe. It seems the consistent theme throughout the biblical usage is that of basic principles of religion. Thus it seems that the “heavenly bodies” mentioned in 2 Peter 3 should probably be translated something like the KJV, but understood as a reference to the elements of the Old Covenant order. God was not about to nuke the stars, but He was about to destroy the Old Covenant Temple with all of its special rules, rituals, rites, vessels, and paraphernalia. These basic elements—which Paul calls stoicheia tou kosmou (“elements of the kosmos”)—would be no more.

And as that old heavens and earth passed away, Peter and his audience looked for—“expected,” “eagerly anticipated”—a new heavens and new earth in which righteousness dwells.

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New heavens and new earth

Peter concludes this section:

But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells (2 Pet. 3:13).

Most commentators make the connection between this passage and Isaiah 65:17: “For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind” (Isa. 65:17). Isaiah’s description which follows of this new heavens and new earth includes the well-kown references to extra-long age (someone dying at 100 years is just a child and considered accursed for living so briefly) and changes in the nature of deadly beasts: “’The wolf and the lamb shall graze together; the lion shall eat straw like the ox, and dust shall be the serpent’s food. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain,’ says the LORD” (Isa. 65:25).

The exact phrase appears again in Isaiah 66:22, and later in the New Testament in Revelation 21:1. Again, I must shorten this study more than I would like:

While 2 Peter 3:13 is definitely related thematically to Isaiah 65, it is a mistake to think that there is an exclusive relationship between the Isaiah passage and any New Testament usage, as if Isaiah were giving a unique prophecy of a unique event in the future, and then Peter and John were announcing the fulfillment of that one predicted event on their horizon (or at any time in the future). It is not that Isaiah announced “X,” and that Peter and John were saying “the time has come for X,” after which time “X” is done and gone. Rather, both texts are partaking of a much larger theological genre which is replayed many times throughout Scripture, and which reappears particularly prominently in these passages. This is to say that while Isaiah 65 is certainly a backdrop to the New Testament references to a new heavens and new earth, it is not the ultimate basis of it.

That ultimate basis is found in Genesis 1. All talk of creations or new creations and the mechanisms God uses to bring them about are rooted in the first chapter of Scripture and cannot be understood properly unless we begin there. This is not just because the theme of “creation” in general begins there, as if we cannot discuss “new” creation without relaying the theological foundations of creation in general afresh every time. Rather, it is because creation and Spirit-nurtured re-creation are there exhibited as God’s primary modus operandi for every act of blessing He brings about (by contrast, acts of judgment are often presented as language of de-creation).

At many points in Scripture these relational/covenantal images are rehearsed, usually in conjunction with periods of transition and judgment. God creates primordial tohu and bohu (Gen. 1:2); the Spirit/Wind of God then hovers (flutters like a bird) over the waters, and out of this comes ordered creation (Gen. 1:2ff).

God created man out of the dry land, and His Breath/Spirit entered that lifeless form and became a living system and image of God. God’s is now carried in the Temple made without hands, man.

The same story plays out with Noah. God had Noah prepare an ark/Temple in which life was preserved, which floated upon the chaotic flood. After some time a dove is sent out—an image of that Spirit hovering over the face of the waters—until dry land appears. A new creation is born. Indeed, emerges from the shut-ark—an image of resurrection. He is then designated an ish hadamah (Gen. 9:20)—translated as “man of the soil” and understood as “farmer,” but h-adam-ah is also a clear poetic reference to the original man Adam who was taken from the adamah, soil. The image: Noah is a new “Adam” standing upon the dry land of the Spirit-discovered new creation.

It plays out again with the Israelites, living in the “without form and void” of the Sinai wilderness. The unfaithful die there (in judgment), but the faithful are led by the Spirit (pillar of fire and cloud), across the waters of the Jordan, into the promised land (a new garden).

Jesus replays this exact picture: He is baptized in the waters of the Jordan river; at that moment the Spirit descends upon him in the form of a buffalo—just seeing if you were paying attention—no, in the form of a dove, and this is indication to John the Baptist that Jesus is the Messiah. Indeed, Jesus is, once again, the new Adam, the new creation, the new Israel, the new Temple etc.

This Jesus then predicts the destruction of the Old Covenant Temple, while predicting the rebuilding of the Temple (His body) in three days—His resurrection. The Old Temple is thus being replaced by the New One. Thus, in covenantal language: the present heavens and earth were being replaced by the new heavens and earth.

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This new heavens and earth was, first, the new Temple, the body of Jesus. The new “stone cut out without hands” which would grow and fill the earth (Dan. 2:35–45). But this body/Temple, we know, is not limited to Jesus’ physical/resurrected body alone. There is a whole doctrine of the “body of Christ” in Scripture (Rom 12:5; 1 Cor. 12:12–27; Eph. 3:6; 5:23; Col. 1:18, 24; cf. John 15), and it is all implicated in the doctrine of the new Temple as well. Peter—it is fitting—mentions how believers are living stones that build up a spiritual house: “you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 2:5).

Paul is even clearer on this point. Union with Christ in “one new man” he connects with the new temple image:

For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit (Eph. 2:18–22).

And just as Peter was looking for that new creation in which “righteousness dwells,” so Paul assures us that the “new man” is “created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph. 4:24).

In other words, the church—the body of all believers—are part of the new Temple. They are thus the new creation as well: the body of the new Adam, the new dwelling place of God via the Spirit. For this reason, Paul can say, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Cor. 5:17). The literal Greek here is so spare it is even more frank: Therefore, if anyone in Christ, new creation: the old things passed, behold, new have come.

This—the church—is the new heavens and new earth in which righteousness dwells which Peter and his audience anticipated. It was already there definitively because of the finished work of Christ, but it was not fully ratified—confirmed in history, if you will—until the purge of that old system was completed, and until that old Temple—a stack of stones which were cut out with hands—was leveled to the last block.

New Creation, New Adam, New Eve, New Marriage

The doctrine of “new heavens and new earth” appears most prominently in the New Testament in Revelation 21, and it ties together all of these themes and then some. The text reads,

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true” (Rev. 21:1–5).

We have seen the doctrine of the new creation and the new Adam, and we have discussed “union” with Christ in which believers become part of that creation. These images are repeated here, largely, and a hint is given which both 1) involves the nature of that union, and 2) ties all of the imagery back to the original creation.

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First, we have already mentioned that there can be many heavens and earths in this regard, in this typological application, so we must not necessarily translate protos here as “first.” One could only be dogmatic about this from the basis of some preconceived eschatological system being imposed upon the text. Instead, verse 1 should better read, “I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the former heaven and the former earth had passed away.” This is perfectly allowable within the range of normal meanings for protos and fits better with what else we’ve learned so far. This interpretation also fits better with the common translation of protos in the following verse 4: “former [prota] things have passed away.”

This understanding is also backed up by the fact that there was a “world” (kosmos) prior to the flood (2 Pet. 3:5), and yet another “world” after it (Gal. 4:3 et al), and yet the new heavens and new earth of 2 Peter 3:13 and Revelation 21:1 is yet another new creation. In other words, there is not simply a first and a second, but many recurring new creations covenantally speaking as God progresses his creation toward glory.

Second, we are introduced to another new creation theme, and that is the new Jerusalem. This is yet another reference to the church, for Paul tells us in Galatians 4:26, “But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother.” This is in contrast to the earthly Jerusalem, which was in bondage to the Old Covenant, and which was soon to be destroyed, or “cast out” in Paul’s allegory (Gal. 4:21–31).

Indeed it is just this “Jerusalem above” which we meet again in Revelation 21, for this “new Jerusalem” was above, but descended “down out of heaven from God.”

This image is nowhere made more forcefully brilliant than in the book of Hebrews, where the author culminates his pro-Christian argument against the Old Covenant systems by telling the saints,

you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel (Heb. 12:22–24).

So it’s clear that this new Jerusalem is indeed the New Covenant church. We also have reiterated the righteousness that dwells in this new creation which houses “the righteous made perfect.”

In one sense, new Jerusalem is indeed the church, wedded as a bride in union to Christ. In another image, new Jerusalem is a New Eve to conjoin the New Adam, and Paul says “she is our mother.” Since only those who are in Christ have life, we can say that this new Jerusalem is the mother of all living—and thus, truly a New Eve, New Adam’s Bride (Gen. 3:20).

Third, the connection between the New Jerusalem of Revelation 21 and the New Testament body of Christ/new Temple is seen in the language of the relevant passages:

the household of God, built on the foundation [themelio] of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone (Eph. 2:19–20).

And the wall of the city had twelve foundations [themelious], and on them were the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb (Rev. 21:14).

Unless this foundation that is the apostles has more than one superstructure erected upon it, we must assume some vital organic connection between the New Testament “temple in the Lord . . . dwelling place of God” of Ephesians 2 and the “new Jerusalem . . . dwelling place of God” of Revelation 21.

Fourth, what really is of delightful interest here, in terms of biblical theology, are the images opened up by the phrase “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev. 21:2). This draws together creation, marriage, and covenant, and world-order all in one place.

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A Bride Adorned, or Kosmetology School

We have encountered the idea of “world” (kosmos) and have seen than while it significantly overlaps with “heavens and earth,” it is by no means always identical. Without time to do an extensive study to hash out all of the instances, it will suffice to say that “heavens and earth” seem to be a much broader and more general category than kosmos is most often used to denote. Granted, “world” does have universal import in many cases (dare we deny it in John 3:16?), but too many uses of kosmos and its various forms denote something much narrower and more technical than the universe at large.

Significantly here, this new Jerusalem bride of Revelation 21:2 is said to be “adorned” as a bride for her husband. The word for “adorned” translates a form of kosmos—here a perfect passive participle, kekosmemenen (“having been adorned”). In its verb form—kosmeo, etc.—the word alerts us to the more technical meanings that we are not used to associating with “cosmos” in our vernacular. We are too used to thinking of the “cosmos” as the “universe”: Russian astronauts, space explorers after all, are called cosmonauts. Carl Sagan—an astronomer—wrote a book and TV series about the universe called Cosmos. We describe things of grand, interstellar scale as being “cosmic.” And yet we have a perfectly technical usage of the word in our vernacular which is even more common but does not seem to register as quickly in regard to kosmos, and that is cosmetic. Makeup, fashion, plastic surgery, hair styling—all aspects of kosmeo which register more with “a bride adorned” than with a “universe.” Much of the usage of the word in Scripture relates more to our modern cosmetology than to our astronomy. This is about arrangement, adornment, even decoration, more than the physical matter of outer space and solar system—except insofar as the solar system, etc. are understood as God’s intricate and aesthetic ordering of things.

Indeed, this is the sense we more often than not get from Scripture (with the exception, perhaps, of the writings of John, who uses the word inordinately and almost always has a universal meaning in mind). Just a few examples:

1. The multitude of stars are referred to as “the host of heaven.” “Host” is kosmos (Gen. 2:1; Deut. 4:19; 17:3; Isa. 13:10 all LXX). Here the idea is “array” and the Hebrew word behind it is often applied to an army set in array for battle.
2. In many cases ornaments of different types of apparel—in many cases, jewelry—are described by forms of kosmo (Ex. 33:5–6; 2 Sam. 1:24; Isa. 3:1–26; 49:18; 61:10; Jer. 2:32; 4:30; Ezek. 7:20; 16:11; 23:40–41; 1 Pet. 3:3; 1 Tim. 2:9; Rev. 21:2, 19). Here it clearly means adornment and even decorative adornment. It is often a cause of sinful pride and vanity.
3. It is used to describe other types of decorations, such as of tombs, houses, and buildings (Matt. 12:44; 23:29; Luke 11:25; 21:5).
4. It described the fashioning or crafting of things in a special way: for example, who can straighten [kosmesai] what God has made crooked? (Eccl. 7:13 LXX). Solomon “set in order” [kosmion] many proverbs (Eccl. 12:9).

Again abbreviating, what we see here is not just making in general, but purposeful, delightful, decorative, comely art. We see this as God’s creation, yes, but in kosmos He is making something that has beauty and attraction. He is an artist, painting His divine bride, a delightful companion, and falling in love with her. It is His bride specially adorned for Him.

Yet she is also a city. She is a system: both chaotically buzzing and orderly, predictable, grand, complex—just like the fixed constellations and host of heaven, and the armies of God in battle-array. Applied to the covenantal systems governing God’s people over centuries in different forms, God’s kosmos is more than a decorative adornment, it is a world order. And dare we say it? Every time God brings about a new heavens and new earth—a new kosmos—we may well be justified in saying God brings about a new world order.

So here we see the theology behind the new heavens and new earth—at least in an abbreviated version. It is rooted in Genesis 1 and 2. Noah preached it. So did the Patriarchs, Moses, and Joshua. Samuel knew it; David preached it and sang it several times. Isaiah pronounced it; so did Ezekiel, and all the prophets, really. Nehemiah lived it, in part. Jesus brought it about, and His apostles lived through its birthpangs. This theology has never changed, though it has been told many times. It lies at the heart of what 2 Peter 3 is saying, as well as Revelation 21. They are all connected. One logos, one word, manifested in several “worlds” so far.

1. See Leithart, The Promise of His Appearing, 100.

The following is some background work on a larger study (to be completed tomorrow) on the “new heavens and new earth” motif in the New Testament. Before getting there, it turned out be necessary for me—psychologically at least, anyway—to lay the preterist foundations of the whole of 2 Peter 3. Tomorrow we will move on to the theological themes.

I fundamentally agree with the position Peter J. Leithart lays out in his little book The Promise of His Appearing: An Exposition of Second Peter.[1] Leithart presents the case that all of 2 Peter 3 (and all of 2 Peter for that matter) was a single coherent message that must be interpreted in the pre-AD 70 context. If you want a little broader treatment than what I present here, I recommend Leithart’s work.

This now the second letter that I am writing to you, beloved. In both of them I am stirring up your sincere mind by way of reminder, that you should remember the predictions of the holy prophets and the commandment of the Lord and Savior through your apostles, knowing this first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. They will say, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.” For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.

But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.

Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells (2 Pet. 3:1–13).

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Here are my own exegetical highlights from 2 Peter’s message as I see it:

First, Peter is writing to a group of first-century Jewish believers. This is the “second letter” to them (3:1), and is addressed “To those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours” (2 Pet. 1:1), which is not very revealing in itself. But the first of those two letters (obviously 1 Peter) addresses this group more specifically as “those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion [diasporas] in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia” (1 Pet. 1:1). “Diaspora” is a well-known technical phrase referring to a people scattered or migrated from one area to another, usually as a result of conquest or exile. First Peter goes on to address the persecution of those saints, giving them comfort and encouragement during their trials. These obviously include Jewish Christians who have fled (were exiled from) Jerusalem under persecution.

Second, the nature of Peter’s message of comfort is of interest: he encourages them by saying the persecution is only temporary—“a little while” [oligon arti]—until the “revelation of Jesus Christ”:

In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ (1 Pet. 1:6–7).

This means both that their persecution would last only “a little while,” and also that Christ would be revealed after only “a little while.”

Both aspects of this promise correlate with the prediction Christ gave of the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in Matthew 24. In that discourse He said, “Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place” (Matt. 24:34). Jesus promised He would return in judgment within that generation. Peter took Jesus at His Word (unlike many modern Christians) and was simply applying this promise to his readers’ situation. For the present, they were being persecuted and run out of town by unbelieving Jews; but Jesus would soon be “revealed” in judgment to destroy that Old Covenant system and its adherents—the very people who were doing the persecuting of these saints. Thus, in “a little while”—within the lifetimes of those original readers—Jesus would be revealed and this particular “revelation” would cause the persecution of these saints to cease (because it would kill most of the persecutors and demoralize the rest).

Note, then, how Christ said “this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.” Note also how something very similar applies to Peter’s comforting of the persecuted saints: their trial is only for a little while until Jesus is revealed. We should connect Jesus’ promise of a return-judgment on Jerusalem within His hearers’ generation directly with the situation of Peter’s audience which had already fled Jerusalem under duress. The “this generation” directly correlates with the “little while” of Peter’s audience.

In fact, there may well have been some of the same individuals who heard Jesus warn “this generation,” were later forced to flee Jerusalem and Judea, who were now sitting among the audience of Peter’s letters.

Third, the entire letter of 2 Peter is an exhortation to the same group addressed in the first letter during this same interim time period to continue trusting what they have been previously taught from the prophets, apostles, and especially the promises of Jesus. Peter “reminded” the group of the first message: “remembrance” is his goal in 2 Peter 1:12, 13, and 15, and 3:1. They were to hold to what had been promised and not to be deceived by false prophets and “scoffers” who had in the mean time (between letters) come among them. In both letters, therefore, patience is the key message—and patience toward the same goal and for the same reason.

Fourth, the message of the scoffers of 2 Peter 3 reveals that the issue was Jesus’ coming and coming soon. That is, it relates to both the fact of His appearing and the expectation of the saints that it would be soon. The first aspect is obvious as the scoffers’ message is, “Where is the promise of his coming?” The second aspect of the timing is implied. Why would they even be questioning why Jesus had not yet appeared if the operating assumption of the audience was not that He would appear soon, or within their lifetimes? Indeed, why would Peter consider such questioning as a product of “sinful desires” (v. 3) and a threat worth countering in writing unless it conflicted with a core expectation that was central to the very message Christ had left? If Peter and these first century Christians did not expect Jesus to return for thousands of years yet, the scoffing makes no sense and is certainly no threat at all to the faith and practice of these first century Christians.

These two aspects of Jesus’ coming and its first-century imminence are not only revealed here but are central to the whole reason Peter wrote to begin with. It was this very questioning of the soon appearing of Jesus that caused Peter to warn of the rise of false prophets immediately in the previous chapter, 2 Peter 2. Peter began that chapter warning that “there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction” (2 Pet. 2:1).

Fifth, the scoffers themselves were first-century individuals. While the phrase “denying the Master who bought them” has made many appearances in free will-vs.-predestination debate, its first-century context must take precedence: these were unbelieving Jews who had been given the oracles of God, were expecting their Master and Messiah, and yet when He came they rejected Him. “He came unto his own, and his own received him not” (John 1:11). Further, Jesus had warned his disciples, “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you” (John 15:18), and “you will be hated by all for my name’s sake” (Mark 13:13). Now this was literally coming true as those who rejected and denied Christ now turned against His disciples. They were persecuting the believing Jews, enticing them with many deceptions and arguments for leaving the Messiah they had embraced, and thus “denying the Master.” They were denying Him in every sense—including contradicting His own Word that He would appear within the generation.

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Therefore, the scoffers of 2 Peter 3 should be identified with the false prophets of 2 Peter 2. They did not believe Jesus was the Messiah when He came in the flesh, and they persisted in this unbelief throughout the generation. They tried to force it upon Jesus’ faithful followers by scoffing at His promise to return. Just as they had mocked Him to come down when He was on the cross, so they mocked Him to appear as His delay made His promise to return seem vain.

Sixth, the scoffers’ argument and Peter’s response relate directly to Jesus’ first-century warnings to His disciples. The scoffers’ argument is backed by a general appeal to something like uniformitarianism: “For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation” (v. 4). While there can be discussion about which “fathers” are actually in view here, the main aspect of the argument lies in the phrase “all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.” These guys saw nothing out of the ordinary, life goes on, nothing changes, so much for this great prediction made by Jesus, allegedly supposed to happen in their lifetimes

If “fathers” refers to the first-century New Covenant “fathers”—the apostles—as most modern commentators seem to think, then this makes even more sense. Jesus was allegedly supposed to come within the generation, but if the very people who believed and spread this message were passing away, that promise would be looking all the more vain.

The only thing that stops me from quickly adopting this view is the definitive nature of the phrase “the fathers fell asleep.”  The word “fell” is in the aorist tense which usually denotes simple passive without continuing action into the present. This is strengthened by the “since,” which indicates the audience was looking backward on the fact. And the phrase “the fathers” is comprehensive: It seems to indicate all the fathers fell asleep, not just some. But we know this is not the case with at least one of those “fathers”— Peter—who is alive to write this letter after all. So there should be some hesitation in adopting this view too quickly. In the end, however, the argument of the scoffers is driven more by the alleged uniform continuance of history through the audience’s present than by the starting point of the “fathers.”

Peter’s response is highly notable: “For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished” (2 Pet. 3:5–6). Peter says essentially, “You want to talk about uniform history since the beginning of creation? Ok, let’s do. Ever heard of a thing called the flood?” Peter says these scoffers are willingly ignoring how God once destroyed the world by the flood, and thus how things haven’t always continued as they were since the beginning of creation.

Peter had brought this up already when he covered the false prophets in the previous chapter. The entire world at that time scoffed at the prophecy of Noah:

For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly. . . .

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And furthermore,

if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; and if he rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked (for as that righteous man lived among them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard); then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment, and especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority (2 Pet. 2:4–10).

Peter’s response to the scoffers’ argument is thus essentially to say, “You sound like the people who mocked Noah before the promised flood came. But . . . it came.” And to the persecuted saints the message was that God knows perfectly well how to bring judgment on those people while at the same time preserving His saints.

The argument and Peter’s response are vitally connected to the first century context, as they were directly anticipated by Jesus in Luke 17:

Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man. They were eating and drinking and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot—they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, but on the day when Lot went out from Sodom, fire and sulfur rained from heaven and destroyed them all—so will it be on the day when the Son of Man is revealed (Luke 17:26–30).

We should, in fact, understand Peter’s response to the scoffers as merely an application of Jesus’ teaching here—a teaching Peter would have learned in person with Jesus. When the situation arose with his persecuted audience, it was not a hard call on how to respond. While the scoffers willingly ignored the nature of God’s cataclysmic judgments in history, Jesus and Paul emphasized them as blueprints of what was very soon to come.

Note not only the similarity in the reference to Noah and the flood, but also language of Jesus’ return to destroy the ungodly. Jesus describes it as a day in which he will be “revealed” (Luke 17:30); this is the same language with which Peter comforts his readers, assuring them that the “revelation of Jesus Christ” will occur in “a little while” (1 Pet. 1:7). The same Greek word, apokalypsis, is employed in both.

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The context of Luke 17 makes the first-century context clear as well: it puts this cataclysmic judgment in the context of the coming of the kingdom (Luke 17:1) and right on the heels of Jesus being rejected and suffering from “this generation” (Luke 17:25). As I wrote in Jesus v. Jerusalem:

But the disciples receive special instruction as to the nature of the visible coming judgment. Many will be looking for Christ after Christ is gone (thus there would be many false Christs in that interim period, Matt. 24:5; Luke 21:8), and of all people who had a keen interest in His arrival, the disciples would be most anxious, for they would be among the few who knew for sure He was coming back in their lifetimes. So Jesus makes sure to insulate them against false Christs. He does this by teaching them about the true nature of the coming destruction He has been preaching about:

And he said to the disciples, “The days are coming when you will desire to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it. And they will say to you, ‘Look, there!’ or ‘Look, here!’ Do not go out or follow them. For as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day.  But first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation. Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man. They were eating and drinking and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot—they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, but on the day when Lot went out from Sodom, fire and sulfur rained from heaven and destroyed them all—so will it be on the day when the Son of Man is revealed. On that day, let the one who is on the housetop, with his goods in the house, not come down to take them away, and likewise let the one who is in the field not turn back. Remember Lot’s wife. Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it. I tell you, in that night there will be two in one bed. One will be taken and the other left. There will be two women grinding together. One will be taken and the other left.” And they said to him, “Where, Lord?” He said to them, “Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather” (Luke 17:22–37).

We have already discussed part of this passage in relation to the exodus motif with Noah and Lot. These were forewarned men who were prepared for a coming judgment and got out when the time came. The others were all taken by surprise by a massive cataclysmic judgment. Here Jesus sees fit to give His disciples this warning, but not unto the multitudes or the Pharisees. This was a warning to the elect remnant only, for only they would get out.

The lesson is necessary because the pressure to follow after false Christs would be overwhelming. Jesus would later say that these false prophets would be so persuasive that, if it were possible, they would deceive even the elect (Matt. 24:24). The elect remnant, in other words, would need a special focus upon the true Christ, special warning, and here they received it. “Behold, I have told you in advance” (Matt. 24:25). After this, Jesus will immediately proceed to a parable concerning the focused prayers of the elect, as we shall see.

In addition to this lesson which we have already covered earlier, it is important to note Jesus’ prediction, “But first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation” (17:25). This verse will have great importance later when we hear Jesus referring again to “this generation.” To those who may be tempted to argue there that “this generation” refers to something other than the generation to whom Jesus was speaking—something more general or more future—the context here in Luke 17:25 makes it clear that Jesus’ “this generation” would be the same generation which rejected Him and caused Him to suffer.

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Peter continues through with the logic of his argument: these scoffers are willingly ignorant of the judgment that overthrew the scoffers of the old world in the time of Noah, and yet the flood came. Just so, the present world (at the time) would indeed be judged by fire and the ungodly scoffers themselves would perish (v. 6–7). We’ll discuss these passages for their theology in a moment.

So up to this point we can understand:

1)      Peter’s letters were written to a specific first century audience for a specific first century setting

2)      That setting and the persecution in it was only temporary and brief, for Jesus would be revealed in “a little while.”

3)      Second Peter follows directly and consistently from First Peter with the same theme, audience, context, promises, encouragement, message, etc.

4)      The scoffers’ argument assumes that the saints expected Jesus to appear and to appear soon.

5)      The scoffers themselves, therefore, must have come during that time in the first-century.

6)      Peter’s response corresponds to Jesus’ teaching in Luke 17, which strongly suggests a first-century judgment-coming of Jesus.

In light of these facts, consider Peter’s extension of the logical argument:

But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.

Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God (2 Pet. 3:8–12).

In light of what we have already learned, we can be sure Peter’s main point here has nothing to do with actual thousands of years, but simply with restoring the comfort of these persecuted saints and refuting the scoffers who argued essentially, “Look how much time has already passed and nothing has changed, the Lord has not appeared. Get a clue: He ain’t comin’ back.” Peter says wait a minute, God’s timing is not our timing: what seems like eons to us is merely a day to him; what we overlook as a passing day He may consider to have the import of a thousand years. God is patient, waiting to bring in the full number of elect saints to your fold before He completes his promise. The point is, trust God’s timing, not man’s perceptions of time. In God’s time, Peter says, that day of judgment would indeed come just as Jesus promised.

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Two teachings of Jesus come into view here: one is a direct reference from Jesus, the other an application. The first is Peter’s reference to the “thief in the night.” Jesus used this exact metaphor in Matthew 24:43 and Luke 12:39, among others (Paul repeats it as well in 1 Thessalonians 5:1). To the extent we understand Jesus as speaking in a first-century context in those passages, so we should also see it here with Peter, only nearer to becoming a reality.

And in the mean time, those persecuted followers needed to hold more steadfastly than ever to the faith they professed. This second idea is an application of Jesus’ teaching about the power of the false prophets that would come. He had said, “For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. See, I have told you beforehand” (Matt. 24:24–25; Cf. Mark 13:23). “See” here is from the Greek idou and means “listen up,” “take heed” “pay attention.” Jesus was emphatic here because it would be of such importance to His audience (the disciples). This was not mere rhetoric, it was a critical reality: some false prophets would be so deceptive as to deceive even the elect if that were possible. Jesus essentially said, “Wake up, people. This is real. It will happen. I am telling you now so you know when it happens. I have warned you.” Peter took that warning to heart and was just as emphatically relaying it to his own readers.

So far then we have established a first-century context for the meaning and fulfillment of this passage. There are aspects we have not yet covered, but they do not affect the timing of the passage. What we’ve seen so far will be further enhanced by the theological study of more of the passage that follows.

1. Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2004.

A good friend of mine, a pastor and an elder of a growing Reformed church in Texas, wrote me recently:

Bo,

Do you think my preaching is not balanced? I get criticized by other Christians a lot and it makes me doubt myself and do a self examination. . . . How many of my sermons have you listened to? My answer is that what I preach emerges as a result of faithful exposition and application of Scripture. I recently finished a series on James and am now going through Colossians.

From the rest of the letter (I omit some of it for it includes personal references) it becomes clear that the critics claim that my friend’s frequent mention of politics and culture is what makes his preaching “not balanced.”

So it’s politics and culture.

I know my friend, and I have listened to his sermons and teachings, and I have read his articles, and I have been to his church many times, and I have even had the [undeserved] privilege to teach in his Sunday school and preach in church. I can say this:

My friend teaches his congregation theology: The Person and the nature of God, the Trinity, the communicable and incommunicable attributes of God; creation in six days; the Creation ordinance and covenant of God with mankind, and the restorative covenant with the redeemed humanity after the Fall.

He also teaches the nature of man and his God-given Dominion Mandate; the Biblical significance of work and stewardship. He and another elder in the church are independent businessmen, and as such they teach and give example to others of the Christian way of doing business. He also teaches the Fall, the nature of sin, redemption, salvation, and the status of the redeemed man in Christ; the sacrifice and the blood of Christ as the only means for man to be restored into fellowship with God. He is an active evangelist himself, both in personal evangelism and through radio spots on the local radio stations. People in his church are also actively involved in evangelism; a young entrepreneur and business owner in the church often takes a loud-speaker after work and goes to a street corner to do street evangelism. The church has strong families and Christian education of the children – especially home education – is encouraged. Another elder of the church is a professional educator, and as we talked a few weeks ago, he is in the process of creating a curriculum for a local Christian school run by another pastor in the area.

My friend also teaches the Law of God as a tutor to Christ, as a mirror for us to reveal our sin, and as a rule of righteousness and justice, individual and collective. He preaches on Biblical ethics and encourages his congregation to seek that sanctification that can be achieved only through obeying the Law of God. His church is very strict about sinful conduct, and has high requirements of its members.

He teaches on the work of God in history – God’s sanctions for nations and individuals according to their obedience or disobedience to the Law of God. He is especially fond of teaching the history of Christian England (Alfred the Great is one of his heroes) and Christian Scotland (he teaches Sunday school on the Scots Worthies by John Howie).

He teaches his church the Great Commission and the victory of the Gospel in history. The church is well learned in the different eschatological views, better than many other churches that I have visited over the years. One of my first experiences when I visited his church for the first time was to get a thorough lesson by one of the church members on the differences between pre- and postmillennialism, and the importance of eschatology to our actions today. The church member was an ordinary Christian, he never went to seminary, and he never had any formal theological or philosophical education outside of his local church.

In fact, in general, my friend’s church is among the top churches I know in terms of thorough training in systematic theology, Biblical theology, applied ethics, and many other areas. They have weekly communion, and their worship and preaching are all self-consciously based on the Bible. The members are catechized, they know the creeds, and can recite them. And these people read voraciously.

And yes, he also applies the truths of the Bible to the political and cultural arena. He is not one of those Christian celebrities, fake Christian leaders and teachers, who insist that there is no such thing as a Christian culture, or Christian government, or Christian political action. He believes that the Gospel applies to those areas of man’s life and actions too.

And for that, he is branded as “not balanced” by his critics.

I know his detractors too. They seldom teach beyond a small set of three or four topics, mainly emotionally charged or intellectually obscure. Personal piety, ecclesiology, and what they call “the Gospel,” which is the simple proposition that Jesus came to die for our sins. (The idea that the Gospel includes much more than that, and that it is a power for salvation of the whole world is way beyond their limited understanding of it.) Sometimes family, and it only in the context of husband-wife and parents-children relationship; Biblical prerogatives of the family like work, economics, education, welfare, inheritance issues etc. are not mentioned. A multitude of topics is left outside of their preaching and teaching: economics, civil government, politics, money, education, culture, law, history, science, social studies, etc. Because their preaching and teaching is limited to a few topics and propositions, they are trying to stretch their preaching and teaching to fill their courses and lectures and sermons, repeating the same things over and over again, and engaging in irrelevant elaboration on minutest details of obscure theological or literary points; or resort to hollow moralisms in the area of ethics and practical living.

But my friend is branded as “not balanced” while they believe themselves to be “balanced” in their preaching and teaching.

How did we get to this point? How did we allow those ministers of the Gospel who diligently work to apply the Gospel to every area of life to be branded as “not balanced” while elevating as celebrities those that say that there is no such thing as Christian culture, or Christian civil government, or Christian economics? How did we allow the idea that Christ rules in every area of life and therefore His Law must be the law of the land in every area of life, to be branded as “triumphalism” and “transformationism” and other derogatory names; while the closing of the Christian mind and the shrinking of the Christian religion to matters of personal piety only is considered “true Christianity”?

What would we call those Christians who fought and built this nation 200 years ago, who believed that religious liberty could not be separated from economic and social liberty? What would we say to John Witherspoon, the spiritual father and guide of almost all Founding Fathers, who in 1774 said the following:

There is not a single instance in history, in which civil liberty was lost, and religious liberty preserved entire. If therefore we yield up our temporal property, we at the same time deliver the conscience into bondage. . . .

Witherspoon was openly calling his fellow Americans to rise and defend their political, economic, and social liberties. Was he “not balanced”? My friend’s detractors, having the luxury of living in the nation founded by those earlier Christians, with liberty and justice for all, would have branded Witherspoon too if he were alive today.

What would we say to Calvin, and the Dutch Calvinists of the 16th and the 17th centuries, and the English Puritans, and the Scottish Covenanters? They were all committed to build a City on a Hill, societies that were in every way obedient to Christ and His Law, including law, civil government, and politics. Because of their work and efforts we can have the United States today; and because of their writings we can talk about such values like individual liberty, economic liberty, equality before the law, privacy, immunity, etc. Again, my friend’s detractors, having the luxury of living in a world heavily influenced and built upon those ideas, would have branded Calvin and those earlier Reformed Christians as “not balanced.”

What would we say to the Christians and church leaders in the 12th and the 13th centuries who patiently and systematically worked to eradicate the old pagan tribal laws and customs of the Romans, Greeks, Celts, and Saxons, and replace them with the canon law of the church? Under the old pagan laws, women were considered less than human and couldn’t inherit; and also, under the old pagan laws, there was still slavery in Europe in some places. The church’s canon law destroyed slavery and limited the power of kings and barons over their subjects. And what would we say to the bishops who drafted Magna Carta and forced King John to sign it, thus laying the foundation for the liberty and justice for all we enjoy today? Would we say they were “not balanced” to involve in such activity to protect life, liberty, and property?

What would we say to Bishop Ambrose when he excommunicated Emperor Theodosius, and when the Emperor responded in anger that he was coming to seize his church, Ambrose’s words thundered throughout the ancient world:

You have no right whatsoever to enter the house of a common man; what makes you believe you can enter the house of God?

Or what would we say to Augustine who declared that “no republic is properly constituted save the republic whose Founder and Ruler is Jesus Christ,” and then told a young ruler, “if your government doesn’t have for its ultimate goal the worship of God, then the welfare of the people is not true welfare”?

We have lost our way as a church. We call good evil and evil good. We elevate for celebrities those that keep us in ignorance concerning the true extent of the Gospel, lulling our consciences by telling us that “there is no such thing as Christian culture or government.” We call those preachers that preach and apply the whole counsel of God “not balanced”; and we praise and honor those that pick and choose what in the Bible they will teach. We have limited Christ’s power and Crown rights to a ghetto, and we have left the world to His enemies; and we even brag about it as if it is some lofty example of piousness.

And then we wonder why we are losing our children, and why the world is getting more and more anti-Christian, and why our rulers are more open in their rebellion and sin and injustice.

And we have good theological excuses for it.

It’s time to change that. It’s time to call good good, and evil evil. And listen to the true balanced preachers like my friend. And send his critics to where they belong: the garbage heap of history.

On the eve of 39^th anniversary of the 1973 Roe v. Wade pro-abortion decision, the Obama administration has mandated that “many church-affiliated institutions will have to cover free birth control for employees.” This does not mean that Christians will have to get abortions. Keep this in mind as you read the rest of this article.

Not only is Obama the food stamp president, the unemployment president, the no drilling for oil here president, the pro-homosexual military president, he is now the abortion president.
What I’m about to write may seem inappropriate given the tragedy of abortion. Sometimes when people are confronted with the consequences of their worldview the blinders come off. And if they don’t, they will have no future.

There are unintended consequences to what people believe and implement into law. For example, men in China are realizing the disastrous effects of their country’s one-child policy. If a family can only have one child, most Chinese families opt for males. As a result, there aren’t enough women for men to marry.

Low birth initiatives and aggressive pro-abortion policies have created a birth dearth in many European countries and Russia. Even birth rates among Muslims in Europe are in decline. David P. Goldman calls it “the closing of the Muslim womb.”

If demographic winter is encroaching slowly on the West, a snap frost has overtaken the Muslim world. Europe has had two hundred years to make the transition from the high fertility rates of rural life to the low fertility rates of the industrial world. Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria are attempting it in twenty. The graying of the Muslim world in lapsed time, as it were, can have only tragic consequences.

The Muslim world is on the brink of the fastest population decline in recorded history. Academic demographers are stunned. “In most of the Islamic world it’s amazing, the decline in fertility that has happened,” Hania Zlotnik, head of the United Nations’ population research branch, told a 2009 conference.[1]

What’s happening around the world is happening in the United States as well. This is especially true among liberals. So let’s apply the unintended consequences of liberal abortion policies to liberalism as a movement. You may be familiar with the reductio ad absurdum (“reduction to the absurd”) whereby a proposition is disproved by following its implications logically to an absurd consequence.

The Bible presents a version of the reductio argument:

“Do not answer a fool according to his folly,

Or you will also be like him.

“Answer a fool as his folly deserves,

That he not be wise in his own eyes.” (Prov. 26:4–5)

While pro-abortion liberals are doing the environmentally friendly and politically correct thing by not having children and supporting abortion for others, conservatives with their large families will dominate the culture in a generation or two. At least one very liberal columnist has noticed the problem: “[F]or the past 30 years or so, conservatives — particularly those of the right-wing red-state Christian strain — have been out-breeding liberals by a margin of at least 20 percent, if not far more. . . . Libs just aren’t procreating like they could/should be.”[2]

In his book The Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark comments “that Christian prohibition of abortion and infanticide contributed to the success of the new religion. ‘Christian and pagan subcultures must have differed greatly in their fertility rates,’ Stark argues, so that ‘a superior birthrate also contributed to the success of the early church.’”[3]

The push for abortion by the Obama administration may satisfy liberal sensibilities, but in the end, it will result in their demise. Let’s hope so.

That’s why they are pushing so hard to implement their destructive worldview before it is too late.

1. David P. Goldman, How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam is Dying Too) (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2011), 1.
2. Mark Morford, “When Liberals Rule the World: Stats say the GOP is dying. But red-staters are breeding like drunken ferrets. Who wins?,” SF Gate (March 28, 2007).
3. Goldman, How Civilizations Die, 157.

Restoring America One County at a Time

10. The Executive

10.3 Restoring Freedom

In light of all these Executive excesses, what can be done to restore the freedom Americans once had? Even better, how can we return to a society even more free than before—something more akin to biblical controls on Executive tyranny? The answer is two-faceted: first, things average people can do now, and second, larger goals toward which we must aim.

As far as things average people can do now, we must first remember our priorities. Go back to the first topic of this project and work your way through. Pull your kids from public schools; plan and fight for your family autonomy in old age, insurance, etc.; focus on localism, local politics, local control, and start exposing and fighting the massive wastes, corruption, and debts that exist in the thousands of halls of local governments; start focusing on State-level solutions to problems like abortion, exercise Tenth Amendment rights, nullification, etc. Just these first four topics, if put to practice by groups in every county across this nation would go a long way toward softening the scaly underbelly of Leviathan, leaving the monster vulnerable to the forces of freedom. But these topics must come first, because hearts and minds must change through education and individual, local example, and the sacrifices must be made by the serious, the faithful, the courageous first.

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As volume nine of the Biblical Blue Prints series encourages,

I am not calling for wholesale revisions of the Constitution today. These changes must be implemented only after a full-scale revival and the clear-cut political triumph of Christians as self-conscious Christian voters. Attempting to amend the Constitution before you have the votes is suicidal; this would play into the hands of the humanist left wing. Just as internationalism prior to international revival is extremely dangerous, so is attempting any Constitutional amendment nationally before national revival. This would be a top-down political transformation, something quite foreign to Christian social theory. It puts the cart before the horse. The religious transformation must precede the political transformation; the political transformation must precede the Constitutional transformation.

We must therefore content ourselves for the present with small steps.[1]

There are many Christians who cannot see this today, or who deny it. If society is left to their influence, Statists will dominate, there will be no revival of faith and freedom, and society will decline under God’s judgment, or even possibly catastrophic collapse. It will not matter who the president, congressmen, or judges are if they do not first have a biblical worldview and biblical doctrine of exercising power. Changing our priorities and acting accordingly is the first step in creating a generation of properly-focused leaders and citizens.

Secondly, Christians must change their view of the scope of missions. It was a false de-Christianized view of missions that led us into the tyranny we have today—both in regard to messianic warfare and messianic central planning. You can’t have messianic social progress unless the Messiah is in absolute control—legally, judicially, and executively. This means that instead of seeking change through coercion—whether the central planning state or the war-fare/nation-building state—we must have a more concerted effort of evangelism and proper, full biblical-worldview, biblical-society discipleship. My colleague Bojidar Marinov pioneered this field in international missions, particularly in Bulgaria, with a simple translation ministry, translating the pro-Christian society writings of R. J. Rushdoony, Gary North, Greg Bahnsen, and others. People are beginning to replicate this effort in places like Brazil, Puerto Rico, Chile, Italy, and more. Bojidar is also currently writing a book on missions done the biblical way, to be published hopefully this year. But we must not make the mistake of thinking “missions” means international missions alone. As one missionary once told me, “Don’t fly over a mission field to get to one.” As far as learning how biblical freedom applies to every area of government and life, American is nearly as needy a mission field as anywhere else. Indeed, many places are less problematic because they haven’t already grown up with the façade of a Christian nation deceiving them into false assurance and pride.

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Educational matters aside, what can individuals do to combat Executive tyranny like treaty powers, executive orders, and abuses of emergency powers? You can do is get involved in local politics and become an influence against things like Agenda 21. You can form an unofficial local group dedicated to exposing and raising awareness of such intrusions into local government and life. Alert your local sheriff, council members, and the local public to these programs along with the examples of those who area already fighting encroaching tyranny in their own counties. For example, there is http://www.countysheriffproject.org/, http://supportruralamerica.ning.com, http://www.siskiyoucountywaterusers.com/, http://www.defendruralamerica.com/DRA/Home.html, http://pienpolitics.com/, http://24hourpatriots.com/, http://www.constitutionalsheriffs.com/, as well as the pioneering efforts of Sheriff Richard Mack at http://sheriffmack.com/. Through efforts like these we can withstand intrusions at local and even state levels in a highly visible way. This sends a message of popular support for organized resistance to tyranny. The more small groups doing this across the country, the more visible and pervasive that message will be.

The larger social and political needs are more easily stated but harder to achieve. These include revamping the constitutional treaty-making process, curtailing the power of the Executive departments, as well as the presidential use of emergency powers and executive orders. The policy suggestions which follower largely track the recommendations given in the Biblical Blue Prints series volume, Healer of the Nations:

First, we absolutely need a constitutional amendment that places greater checks on the President’s treaty-making powers. No treaty should be ratified without full two-thirds majorities (not just of a quorum) in both houses of Congress. We should at least consider making distinctions between treaties of commerce and treaties of peace or alliance as the Federal Farmer suggested. And since treaties of commerce have much more effect on internal laws, they should be held to the same standard of passage as all domestic legislation. Any treaty that has such effects should be treated so.

We need transparency and accountability in the State department. That huge book listing all of the treaties we mentioned? Those treaties should be compiled in one place online, indexed in every way possible, searchable, and in full text. There should be a complete study done as to which ones are still in force and how they currently affect U.S. Code. This change would require only a willing Executive.

Second, we need to get out of the United Nations. The United States should never send a dime to the UN. It is a messianic organization designed to redistribute wealth throughout the world via socialistic schemes, centralize global public policy, advance a pagan nature-religion, and work toward implementing global government at local levels through comprehensive programs like Agenda 21 and others. UN staff members are required to take an oath of allegiance to the UN. The office of the Secretariat’s own website says,

As international civil servants, staff members and the Secretary-General answer to the United Nations alone for their activities, and take an oath not to seek or receive instructions from any Government or outside authority. Under the Charter, each Member State undertakes to respect the exclusively international character of the responsibilities of the Secretary-General and the staff and to refrain from seeking to influence them improperly in the discharge of their duties.[2]

Any American taking such a job—and thus such an oath—should automatically be required to revoke their U.S. citizenship or face charges of treason. This harsh-sounding reaction gets to the heart of what the UN is about: it is a would-be global government designed to transcend national sovereignty. Only Jesus Christ has any claim to legitimate global sovereignty.

Third, we need drastically to cut the size and even existence of some Executive departments. The State Department currently has a budget of $27.4 billion annually and a staff of 49,900 employees. George Washington ran it with six. This is just one department of several. The IRS alone employs over 100,000. In an age in which government spending has become virtually the biggest threat to future liberty, the size of these bureaucracies is simply Executive insanity.

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Fourth, the president should veto any appropriations bill that does not balance the budget, and frankly, in light of the ballooning national debt, he should veto any spending bill that does not follow a plan to create a surplus and begin eliminating huge chunks of the national debt. Such reductions would likely take care of the war and nation-building problem as well. And while at it, he should veto any bill period that construes the constitution to increase the powers of the federal government. The veto is an awesome power rarely used for the public good.

Fifth, the president should rescind all 13,600+ Executive Orders. Granted, he would have to use an executive order to do so, but this one would at least have the virtue of being negative: cancelling government powers rather than creating more of them. Congress should then enact a bill treating all future executive orders like any other law: not actionable unless passed by both chambers of Congress and then signed by the President.

Sixth, we need an Act which genuinely and forcefully binds the Executive in regard to national emergencies and emergency powers. The Acts passed in 1976 and 1977 under the guise of reining-in the abuse of emergency powers have done nothing but codify the abuse by statute while placing only mild checks upon them. The result has been a drastic increase in the number of declared emergencies handing Presidents powers normally reserved only for war. These feeble Acts must either be drastically revised or repealed and replaced with legislation that requires full congressional approval of declared emergencies, again, via recorded roll call votes.

The main goals of these actions are twofold: first to check the power of the Presidency and bring that power back as close to the people as possible. In each of these proposals, Congress becomes responsible for the legislation, or other governmental actions which have the force of legislation. Congress stands responsible for spending, war, tyranny, emergency, invasive measures, etc., and they are on record as to who voted for what. In the case of bills which the President vetoes, it’s even better. This means a supermajority of Congress would be required to pass it. If there is passed a war, more debt, infractions of civil liberties, etc., then the President’s veto makes Congress own it. Any unpopular bill passed by a supermajority at that point will land a lot of Congressmen out of work.

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The second major goal is to remove the massive infrastructure of tyranny that has grown up since the New Deal in 1933. If we could get past Wilsonian and Civil War precedents, that would be even better. But a pre-1933 level of federal intrusion in our lives would at least free us from most of the emergency powers abuses, bloated federal bureaucracies, peace-time central planning, and abuses of executive orders. Even here, however, we need structural changes in order to hinder any attempts to resume such powers again in the future.

Conclusion

Again, these larger structural changes can only come about and have lasting effects if a massive change of hearts and minds occurs first. There are waves of this change happening right now, so there is hope. But we have a long way to go. The most important steps to take now are local: begin individual and organized opposition to local spending, local debts, and intrusions into local sovereignty. A hundred counties eventually telling the EPA and the FDA, “No” will lay impressive foundation for genuine social change toward liberty, and will send a strong message to the bureaucrats and central planners who wish to make marionettes of us all. A thousand counties would be better. A thousand counties shielded by State governments would be even better yet.

1. Gary North, Healer of the Nations: Biblical Principles for International Relations (Ft. Worth, TX: Dominion Press, 1987), 301.
2. http://www.un.org/en/mainbodies/secretariat/ (accessed January 17, 2012); cf. North, Healer of the Nations, 295–6.

Restoring America One County at a Time

10. Executive Tyranny

10.2 How Freedom was Lost

The understanding of how American freedom was lost in and through the Executive branch falls mainly within three categories: 1) treaty powers, 2) the abuse of executive orders, and 3) government by national emergency. The first two of these have been greatly leveraged by the abuse of the third, as we shall see.

Tyranny by Treaty

A constitutionally valid, signed international treaty can have the same force domestically as the U.S. Constitution or statute law. This issue, however, has not been settled legally and if a controversial enough treaty were passed it would undoubtedly create a constitutional crisis. Meanwhile, the ease of passing a treaty is efficient for government’s sake, but leaves the liberty of the people vulnerable. Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution gives the President “Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.”

The President has a full monopoly on the actual negotiation the details of treaties. According to Supreme Court Justice Southerland in United States v. Curtiss–Wright Export Corp. (1936), “He alone negotiates. Into the field of negotiation, the Senate cannot intrude; and Congress itself is powerless to invade it.”[1]

The requirement of a two-thirds vote of the Senators present refers only to a quorum of the Senate, as per Supreme Court decision. A quorum requires only 51 Senators officially, but the Senate’s own website indicates that an even smaller number could constitute a quorum if only a voice vote is taken: “the Senate presumes that a quorum is present unless the contrary is shown by a roll call vote or quorum call.”[2] This means that a treaty can become the law of the land with as few as 34 Senators voting in agreement.

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Taken together these legal requirements indicate that an activist President could sign a radical treaty and have it pass the Senate quickly if the conditions were right. He would need the support of only a loyal minority dedicated to the agenda.

This potential Executive abuse was debated very little during the Convention. When it was debated, the main tension arose over the need for “secrecy” in treaty-making versus the need to reserve legislating power to the Congress only. James Wilson suggested that since treaties will operate like laws, “they ought to have the sanction of laws also.”[3] Roger Sherman responded warning “whether the power could be safely trusted to the Senate,” which at the time was designed to be a voice of States’ power only, not the people at large.

Opposition did arise. One delegate, George Mason, expressed himself in some personal notes to his draft copy of the Constitution; these later became a pamphlet circulated during the ratification period. He bemoaned the exclusion of the people and Congress from the treaty-making power, and the need for “distinctions” in treaties:

By declaring all treaties supreme laws of the land, the Executive and the Senate have, in many cases, an exclusive power of legislation; which might have been avoided by proper distinctions with respect to treaties, and requiring the assent of the House of Representatives, where it could be done with safety.[4]

James Iredell, a leading nationalist in North Carolina and later U.S. Supreme Court Justice, responded to Mason in print. His rebuttal was to reemphasize the secrecy needed for treaties by questioning the safety of trusting Congress. The new system, he assured, will be better because it will have the additional check of “a President with high personal character.”[5] In other words, “just trust us, we’re good people.”

Mason’s point of making distinctions in treaties was echoed by others. The Federal Farmer elucidated on the distinctions between treaties of alliance, peace, and commerce, the latter of which does not require secrecy like others. Such treaties of commerce “almost always involve in them legislative powers, interfere with the laws and internal police of the country, and operate immediately on persons and property.”[6] Yet he thought that the constitutional power of the legislature to regulate commerce with foreign nations was enough to give it “proper controul over the president and senate in settling commercial treaties.”[7]

The most interesting exchange took place between James Madison and Patrick Henry during the ratification debates in Virginia. Henry decried the Treaty powers as excessive and dangerous:

[C]onsider the condition this country would be in if two thirds of a quorum should be empowered to make a treaty: they might relinquish and alienate territorial rights, and our most valuable commercial advantages. In short, if any thing should be left us, it would be because the President and senators were pleased to admit it. The power of making treaties, by this Constitution, ill-guarded as it is, extended farther than it did in any country in the world. Treaties were to have more force here than in any part of Christendom; for he defied any gentleman to show any thing so extensive in any strong, energetic government in Europe. Treaties rest, says he, on the laws and usages of nations. To say that they are municipal is, to me, a doctrine totally novel. To make them paramount to the Constitution and laws of the states, is unprecedented.

Madison countered by arguing that the proposed Constitution was not unprecedented among world powers in this regard, for the King of Britain himself had similar power. Henry rebutted that the English system was actually more limited than the proposed American Constitution in regard to treaties; we should be so lucky as only to have such a king. As it stood,

The constitutions of these states may be most flagrantly violated without remedy. . . . I say again that, if you consent to this power, you depend on the justice and equity of those in power. We may be told that we shall find ample refuge in the law of nations. When you yourselves have your necks so low that the President may dispose of your rights as he pleases, the law of nations cannot be applied to relieve you. Sure I am, if treaties are made infringing our liberties, it will be too late to say that our constitutional rights are violated. . . . A treaty may be made giving away your rights, and inflicting unusual punishments on its violators.[8]

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The main federal salvo against such an abuse would be the hope that the Senate would not be able to ratify the treaty. Otherwise, the whole of Congress could later essentially repeal a treaty by passing new legislation to override the unwanted effects; but the Supreme Court has warned that this could constitute an infraction of international law and would thus be possible grounds for war:

Its infraction becomes the subject of international negotiations and reclamations, so far as the injured party chooses to seek redress, which may in the end be enforced by actual war. It is obvious that with all this the judicial courts have nothing to do and can give no redress.[9]

The number of Treaties to which Americans have been bound through this Executive power are legion. They are so many that no comprehensive publication of the texts of all current binding Treaties has ever been attempted. The State Department does publish a volume merely listing all the Treaties and international agreements in force as of 2011. Merely listing them all by name and date, organized by country, fills a volume of 484 pages.[10] Of course, not all of these are necessarily invasive, intrusive, or otherwise necessarily bad. But the sheer volume of binding agreements in which we have little if any voice should be alarming in itself. The sheer volume greatly increases the risk, if nothing else, that abuses and intrusions will occur, and indeed they have been attempted. Here are a couple of recent examples:

Gun Control Laws

First, consider the United Nations plan of global disarmament—a goal which would impose strict gun-control measures upon its members, including the rightfully gun-loving U.S. There are at least two public efforts aimed at essentially circumventing the U.S. Second Amendment: a Treaty to regulate small arms trade between nations, and the more comprehensive International Small Arms Control Standards (ISACS) project. The first seems less innocuous, though we are unsure what exactly it will contain. The UN assures us it is merely to help fight terrorism and rogue states, but several conservative critics see that even that mild-sounding objective can have drastic consequences for gun registration, licensing, and even outright international gun control laws. In reality, it is probably related directly to this second effort:

The main UN attempt seems focused on the finalization of ISACS—a detailed outline for international small arms policy and implementation. ISACS is a product of the United Nations Coordinating Action on Small Arms (CASA). The latest draft of this document calls not only for regulation of international trade, but for “National controls over the access of civilians to small arms and light weapons,” “National controls over the manufacture of” small arms and light weapons, and eventually “Collection, “Stockpile management,” and “Destruction” of weapons and ammo.[11] It is clear that the agenda here aims far beyond the control of AK-47s to terrorists. Indeed, the “Programme of Action” on the UN’s “Implementation Support System” website exhibit all of these goals in considerable detail and explicitly state that such new laws and regulations shall apply “within the State’s jurisdiction.”[12]

The Obama administration, in particular Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, signaled already in 2009 that they were ready to begin negotiations with the UN on such a treaty.[13] If they succeed, they will have essentially accomplished what the antifederalists and Patrick Henry warned of: the use of treaty powers to trash U.S. liberties. Indeed, this will have occurred in the worst form: the trashing of a clear constitutional Amendment. This would certainly created a constitutional crisis which the Supreme Court would likely—though not definitely—strike down. Fifty Senators have already signed a letter to Clinton saying they will not vote for any treaty which infringes on civilian arms; but remember, it only takes at least 34 if conditions are right. So those opposed must actively resist and stay vigilant lest we be taken unaware.

Global Governance in Your Town

The second example of the danger of treaty powers is the much more ambitious but caeseless attempt for international governance. This appears in such forms as the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity and its sister development, Agenda 21, which could be imposed in the U.S. via a treaty. While you may not have heard of either of these specific United Nations programs, and probably have not heard of any serious attempts to impose international governance on the U.S. in general (at least not accompanied by talk of “tinfoil hats”), such attempts sadly have been very real. One nearly succeeded were it not for last-minute efforts of four investigators providing crucially uncirculated information to a handful of Senators.

In 1992, a United Nations “Earth Summit” was held in Rio de Janeiro. Out of this conference came a book-length document titled Agenda 21 popularizing the slogan “sustainable development.” Basically, every time you hear the world “unsustainable” used in public it’s a by-product of this agenda. According to the online version of the document, Agenda 21 “is a comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations System, Governments, and Major Groups in every area in which human impacts on the environment.”[14] What follows is nearly 300 pages of double-column, fine print providing guidelines for global Treaty controlling of every area of life—everything from all science, business, and industry down to the very air we breathe and water we drink—and calling for international revenue sources (taxes) and mechanisms to pay for it. The preliminary estimate was roughly $600 billion annually just in developing countries, which effectively means a transfer of that proportion of wealth from developed nations to third world partners.[15] It was all couched in terms of saving the environment, and thus providing laws to promote “sustainable” living.

The liberal establishment in the U.S. drooled over the plan. Only months after the Rio Summit, Bill Clinton was sworn into office. Democrats already controlled the Senate, but they still had to walk circumspectly to some degree. Clinton spent precious political capital early pushing a universal health-care plan (which would ultimately fail), NAFTA, the Brady Bill, as well as weathering the Whitewater affair. Clinton signed the Biodiversity Treaty in June of 1993. Over the next few months, Al Gore and a coalition of environmental groups planned a strategy for ramming the Treaty through Congress. When it finally reached Congress in November, the State Department requested it be put on “fast track.” The Treaty was reviewed in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee until June of 1994 when the Committee approved it for vote. Grassroots knowledge was only beginning to mount opposition to the plan of which most Senators were largely oblivious. Quickly, Majority leader George Mitchell (D-ME) announced on August 3 that the Treaty vote was set for August 8. Grassroots went into overdrive leveraging a well-connected system of fax machines to get Senators’ attention. The effort paid off, landing a letter from 35 Republicans on Mitchell’s desk. He rescinded the hasty vote for the moment. This last-minute effort created room for more widespread awareness to solidify opposition as Congress recessed between August 26 and September 12.

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On September 29, Mitchell announced the vote would be rescheduled for 4 P.M. the following day. Already alerted to the radical United Nations agenda behind the Treaty, opposing Senators showed up with large maps of land confiscations, property rights infringements, agricultural controls, and the overall radical environmental agenda displayed for all to see—details which were not supposed to be revealed until after the nations agreed to the treaty in general.[16] Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) led in condemning the foolishness of signing a treaty before its details were known in full. On the floor of the Senate she said,

Under the treaty, a conference of parties will meet after the treaty is in force to negotiate the details of the treaty. We need to know how the Senate, in fulfilling its constitutional responsibilities to concur in treaties, can review the provisions of a treaty that will not be written until the meeting of the conference of parties.

She revealed the plot:

I am especially concerned about the effect of the treaty on private property rights in my State and throughout America. Private property is constitutionally protected, yet one of the draft protocols to this treaty proposes “an increase in the area and connectivity of habitat.” It envisions buffer zones and corridors connecting habitat areas where human use will be severely limited. Are we going to agree to a treaty that will require the U.S. Government to condemn property for wildlife highways? Are we planning to pay for this property? One group, the Maine Conservation Rights Institute, has prepared maps of what this would mean. I do not know if they are accurate yet, but that is my point. Neither do the proponents of this treaty. . . .

This bio-diversity treaty could preempt the decisions of local, State, and Federal lawmakers for use of our natural resources. The details that are left for negotiation could subject every wetlands permit, building permit, waste disposal permit, and incidental taking permit to international review.

We would be subjecting property owners to international review, which would be yet another step in the already egregious bureaucratic processes, just to have the very basic permits necessary for the use of their own private property.[17]

Along with several others, Senator Wallop (R-WY) immediately agreed:

I ask you, can the United States Senate, in good faith, give its consent to this treaty without having had an opportunity to scrutinize the completed convention? The best advice we can give President Clinton right now is to wait until the Convention on Biological Diversity has been completed before asking for our consent.

The last-minute outcry from these Senators created enough awareness and opposition to table the consideration of the Treaty indefinitely. To this day it has never been voted on.

Now ask yourself what would have happened if this small group of concerned grassroots citizens had not sniffed out a genuine conspiracy, been able to alert their fax lists, and been able to convince a few key Senators of the facts. Consider, because of the nature of the Treaty powers of the President and limited Senate, how narrowly we avoided having an international socialist tyranny completely alter the landscape of America.

But the tabled status of the Treaty in the U.S. meant it was also not definitively squelched; it could be resurrected anytime. In fact, where the Convention on Biodiversity’s own website lists the Parties to the Treaty (193 to date), the United States is still listed as a signatory waiting to ratify before becoming a full Party.[18] They’re still waiting on us. They’re patient. (The only others refusing assent are the Vatican and the tiny mountain enclave of Andorra—both of whom also refused even to sign.) In the meantime, the UN masquerades the plan under different names and renewed efforts. The Agenda 21 website confidently states,

The full implementation of Agenda 21, the Programme for Further Implementation of Agenda 21 and the Commitments to the Rio principles, were strongly reaffirmed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) held in Johannesburg, South Africa from 26 August to 4 September 2002.[19]

A toothier document appeared from the UN affiliate the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). First published in 1995, the third edition of the “Draft International Covenant on Environment and Development” arrived in 2004. It aims “to achieve environmental conservation and sustainable development by establishing integrated rights and obligations.”[20] This is the groundwork, further detailed, for the imposition of an international legal authority that transcends American sovereignty.

Executive Orders

Like the patient internationalists, American leftists like former President Bill Clinton were undeterred in their long-term goals by the defeat of the U.N. treaty in the Senate. Clinton demonstrated another outlet by which the Executive can wield its power to advance agendas even when opposed by the people and their Legislature: the executive order.

Though Clinton could not effect the adoption of international law via treaty, he could still help the UN goal of influencing American governments. He wasted no time on this. A full year before the Treaty made it to the floor of the Senate, Clinton signed Executive Order No. 12852 establishing the “President’s Council on Sustainable Development.” This Council was to advise the President on all matters of “sustainable development” and “develop and recommend to the President a national sustainable development action strategy that will foster economic vitality.”[21] In 1997, Clinton revised the Council’s Charter. Whereas the original aimed merely at developing strategy, the new Charter included advising on policy, disseminating educational material, and assessing progress—no doubt the very strategy it had previously devised. The Council was not only to advise on policy, but “to encourage and demonstrate implementation of sustainable development in real world settings” and “report on successes and recommend strategies to replicate those successful projects throughout the United States.”[22] The new policy bulldog was created, funded, and maintained without any input from Congress or the voice of the people.

The Council’s influence was intended to be comprehensive in scope, including local governments. After all, Agenda 21 said greatest resistance comes at that level, and thus “the participation and cooperation of local authorities will be a determining factor in fulfilling its objectives.”[23] Thus the new Council’s job was to encompass “national and local sustainable development plans.” The revised Charter specified the following as one of several official activities for the Council:

The Council should create and participate in projects that help forge partnerships among representatives of federal and state agencies, urban centers, suburban areas, and rural communities with the goal of solving, in a comprehensive way, local and regional sustainable development issues.”[24]

What you’re seeing here is the leftist, one-world government, top-down control version of the very project you’re studying in my book. But instead of Restoring America One County at a Time, they are destroying America one county at a time. Instead of cutting the size of government and returning local government to local responsibility, they are increasing government, imposing yet another higher level of it (global), and coercing (or seducing) local governments to make their local citizens responsible to global agencies.

One of the grassroots activists who fought this at the time (and still does) could lament its progress already in November of 1994:

This vision of local governance leaves city councils, county commissions, soil conservation districts, regional water authorities, and state legislatures completely out of the environmental, land use, sustainable development picture. Never happen? Don’t be too sure. It is already happening.

Literally thousands of private and municipal land use decisions have been blocked by federal regulations. Land use, and therefore resource use, is no longer within the authority of local, or even state governments. Local planning commissions and local county commissions may go through the motions, but their deliberations are likely to center more on compliance with federal regulations than on what’s best for the community. When decisions are reached at the local level, they are still subject to approval or reversal by the federal government.

Local and state governments are further intimidated by the now common practice of withholding federal highway funds, or education funds, or medicare funds, or other funds – until the local government falls into line with the federal demand.

The explosion of unfunded federal mandates in recent years has further weakened the effectiveness of state and local government. By demanding that local and state governments implement federal laws and regulations, the federal government has effectively usurped local government’s authority and ability to pursue its community objectives. As the unfunded mandate trend continues, local and state governments are reduced to little more than administrative units of the federal government.

The transition to bioregional communal, if not tribal, governance, is not going to happen by declaration. Treaty proponents already fear a backlash, and they are much too smart to deliberately precipitate a rebellion. The goal is long-range and fully integrated into a comprehensive program designed to achieve the desired result. Maurice Strong has said the international framework must be in place by 2012. The biodiversity documents anticipate a transition period of 20 to 50 years.[25]

In 1999, Clinton signed Executive Order 13112, advancing an innocuous-sounding plan for combating “invasive species.”[26] It was a back-door ploy for advancing the sustainable development agenda throughout American government. This seemingly obscure issue of invasive species for some reason required the institution of a national “Invasive Species Council.” And while you might think such a Council would involve scientists and biological experts—perhaps it did—it included and demanded compliance from the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Transportation, and the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency—some of the biggest and most comprehensive bureaucracies of the federal government.

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Why? Ostensibly for targeting “invasive species” within their respective jurisdictions; but in reality, it was part of the Agenda 21 plan to increase federal control over every corner of American life. Sure enough, entire UN colloquies have been written on the use of “invasive species” as a means of advancing international law and Agenda 21 specifically.[27] The trick was to find one obscure environmental issue for which the Executive could corral so many important federal agencies to focus on one agenda.

More recently, Barack Obama has implemented the same tactic only on a broader scale with Executive Order 13575, “Establishment of the White House Rural Council.” Again it touted good intentions: “enhance the Federal Government’s efforts to address the needs of rural America . . . to better coordinate Federal programs and maximize the impact of Federal investment to promote economic prosperity and quality of life in our rural communities.” But again, there was a vast consolidation of agenda throughout federal agencies, this time including a much larger list: the Departments of the Treasury, Defense, Justice, Interior, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, Education, Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, EPA, FCC, Office of Management and Budget, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Office of National Drug Control Policy, Council of Economic Advisers, Domestic Policy Council, National Economic Council, Small Business Administration, Council on Environmental Quality, White House Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs, White House Office of Cabinet Affairs—and just in case any had been left out, “other executive branch departments, agencies, and offices as the President or the Secretary of Agriculture may, from time to time, designate.”[28]

The new Council’s scope of mission is just as broad. It shall

coordinate and increase the effectiveness of Federal engagement with rural stakeholders, including agricultural organizations, small businesses, education and training institutions, health-care providers, telecommunications services providers, research and land grant institutions, law enforcement, State, local, and tribal governments, and nongovernmental organizations regarding the needs of rural America.

In other words, the Executive branch via its own fiat now aims to have direct influence over all these areas of private life, business, law, and police at the local level. This was accomplished without legislation, without Congressional approval or scrutiny, purely by the whim of the Executive himself.

These abuses of power illustrate the problem William Symmes mentioned long ago and which we noted in the last section: without clear definitions of the power and laws which the president must take “care” to be executed, he is broadly at liberty to define his own according to his agenda, or another’s.

Keep in mind we have only touched on a tiny few executive orders here. There have been many. The total number is unknown because the government only started counting them in 1907, numbering retroactively from 1862. Still, the consecutively-numbered orders stand currently at No. 13,596, signed December 19, 2011 by Barack Obama. FDR was the king of the Executive Order, signing 3,728 of them. Only one other modern president is even over 500. But just consider the fact that presidents have signed 13,596 different interpretations or applications of their power that are not explicitly stated in the Constitution. There have been on 38 presidents in office since 1862. This means that a mere 38 men have been allowed to circumvent the constitutional legislative process 13,596 times—an average of 357.8 abuses per president.[29] Leveraging previous Acts of Congress which were allegedly designed to prevent open-ended abuses of emergency powers, Clinton empowered himself to seize assets, block property, and prohibit trade with then-Yugoslavia. When military action was inevitable to fulfill the agenda, Clinton shot first and asked questions later. Actually, he never asked at all: he shot first and then made requisite demands later. Between March 24 and April 7, 1999, Clinton simply informed Congress multiple times that he was sending troops to the region and supporting the NATO effort. On April 13, he signed order No. 13119 declaring Yugoslavia and its airspace a “combat zone” by referencing an obscure section of IRS tax code.[30].)) More importantly, the order retro-dated the commencement of “combatant activities” to March 24, 1999, the date NATO bombings had begun and a full three weeks prior to the order. On April 27, Clinton signed E.O. 13120, ordering reserve forces to active duty.[31]

Congress was especially suspect while Clinton effectively steamrolled them. On April 28, the House shot down a declaration of war overwhelmingly, and then appeared to oppose war even further when it passed forbidding the use of ground troops. There is a certain amount of deceptive PR detectable in these moves: the bill which passed suspiciously neglected also to forbid the use of troops in general (only expressly mentioning “ground” troops) or aircraft, etc. Then, not even a month later, the House passed a supplemental appropriations Act giving direct approval of the war by approving billions of dollars to pay for it.[32]

Even after the NATO air campaign was officially over (June 11–12, 1999), Clinton continued to tout the “national emergency” his E.O. declared. In fact, in the final days of his presidency Clinton move to “lift” and “modify” some of the measures taken against Yugoslavia, and yet still referred officially to “the continuing threat” and “national emergency” decreed previously.[33] The order remained effectual until George W. Bush finally revoked it in 2003 with E.O. 13219. Yet Bush’s E.O. itself referred to yet another national emergency described in yet another E.O. from two years earlier which this new one replaced and amended, and thus continued. Bush also declared a national emergency on September 14, 2001, just after the 9–11 attacks, for obvious reasons.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. It turns out that wars and national emergencies are the real powers behind Executive tyranny, and they have been used widely since at least the Civil War to allow the President to circumvent Congress.

Emergency and War Powers

We observed earlier in the chapter on war how the Warfare State and Welfare State have a symbiotic relationship. In modern American history, the “tie that binds” these unholy partners until death do them part has been “emergency powers.” Assumedly an extreme measure for war-time only, modern presidents have increasingly relied on declarations of emergency in order to exercise vast powers domestically and during peacetime.

You probably don’t realize it, but you have lived probably the entirety of your life under national emergency. You almost certainly have if you were born after 1933. In that year, President Roosevelt transformed the United States into a peacetime Executive tyranny. We have mentioned FDR’s first inaugural address on a couple of occasions, noting how the president applied the language of warfare to solving a peacetime problem. It was no mere metaphor, as he clearly said he wanted “broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency.” The solution would come by “treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war.” He used the word “emergency” four times in that address to describe the American scene. It was no coincidence. He gave that speech on March 4, 1933. Five days later, he declared a national emergency which gave the Executive near total control over American life—again, in peacetime.

In 1973, Congress took temporary interest in the subject of emergency powers, long enough at least to discover their history in a Senate study, and to pass an Act purporting to limit those powers. The Act, as we shall see, has done nothing but formally codify and regularize them. That 1973 study begins saying,

Since March 9, 1933, the United States has been in a state of declared national emergency. In fact, there are now in effect four presidential proclaimed states of national emergency: In addition to the national emergency declared by President Roosevelt in 1933, there are also the national emergency proclaimed by President Truman on December 16, 1950, during the Korean conflict, and the states of national emergency declared by President Nixon on March 23, 1970, and August 15, 1971.[34]

Four separate national emergencies sounds crazy, but believe it or not, those were the good ol’ days. Today it is difficult to get an accurate account of all the outstanding national emergencies. The latest revised edition (2007) of a Congressional Research Service report on “National Emergency Powers” lists 42 declared national emergencies just between 1976 and August, 2007.[35] Only 22 of these have been rescinded, leaving 20 in effect. We know Obama added several others on top of those.

The powers given to the Executive under these declarations are broad and numerous:

Under the powers delegated by these statutes, the President may: seize property; organize and control the means of production; seize commodities; assign military forces abroad; institute martial law; seize and control all transportation and communications; regulate the operation of private enterprise; restrict travel; and, in a plethora of particular ways, control the lives of all American citizens.[36]

[T]here are various stand-by laws that convey special emergency powers once the President formally declares a national emergency activating them.  In 1973, a Senate special committee studying emergency powers published a compilation identifying some 470 provisions of federal law delegating to the executive extraordinary authority in time of national emergency. The vast majority of them are of the stand-by kind — dormant until activated by the President.[37]

That 1973 report led eventually to the National Emergencies Act signed into law 1976. The following year saw sister legislation called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. These Acts placed some light checks upon the Executive power but did little more than codify the practice of Executive rule via national emergency into statute law. Thus it received legal sanction. The end result has been a vast increase in the practice rather than Congress curtailing it. After all the dangerous powers listed and exposed by the 1973 report (and a follow-up in 1974), these Acts were preposterously weak in the effect they have had. One is tempted to say they were mere smokescreens.

We do know that the achievement of these vast powers on behalf of the Presidency involved considerable “behind-closed-doors”-type work. This came on the part of government officials and non-governmental collaborators, namely the Rockefeller-funded Spellman fund. One of the main legal obstacles in the way of FDR in 1933 was a strong belief remaining in States’ rights residual in the southern and western States. Any open move on behalf of the President would have caused widespread opposition among the people and like stalled the nationalistic agenda. So the elites moved quietly and stealthily:

Remember that inaugural address on March 4, 1933. Well the immediate day after, a coordinated effort began to get every State governor essentially to effect a State-level emergency power grab in preparation for handing that power directly to FDR. A telegram was received by Kansas Governor Alfred M. Landon stating:

We respectfully submit to your consideration that the dire need of the hour calls for national unity in support of our president a unity even more complete and unselfish than that necessary in war. . . . Prompt and decisive action of a national scope in several directions is necessary to prevent economic collapse throughout the land the ordinary preparations of government that prevail and are suitable in time of prosperity with normal conditions may be too slow to meet adequately this dangerous emergency and stem the danger of an economic avalanche carrying all before it. . . . We a coalition of different groups and political and religious faiths respectfully request that you join the other governors of our country in the issuance of a proclamation on Wednesday March 8th in support of the President of the United States.[38]

The message was signed by a variety of leaders with national profiles: Richard E. Byrd (a celebrity Naval Officer and explorer), Mrs. Calvin Coolidge, Nicholas Murray Butler (president of Columbia University and chair of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), H.G. Harriman (president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce), Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, Walter Lippman, plus labor and farm leaders, as well as hold-outs from the Wilson War State. A national governor’s meeting was called in Washington, D.C.. Those who could not attend got the telegram. Landon responded willingly. Merely a few days later, a new telegram announced “Complete success of program of simultaneous proclamations by all governors of states. . . .Plans being made ready for reading your proclamation in every church in your state.”[39]

Indeed it was successful. Following the proclamations, legislation was rammed through State legislatures. In Colorado, the governor made such a proclamation on August 2, 1933. Two weeks later, the legislature gave the governor all the power he asked for. This new laws so closely paralleled the Governor’s requests and the President’s designs that with such brief time, it is likely they were given pre-prepared copies from which to work.[40]

But the power grab was unprecedented and not with opposition, however futile. In review of these measures (which apparently not legally decisive), the Colorado Supreme Court was appalled. The measures were profoundly unconstitutional:

We venture the assertion that no man, able to read and understand ordinary English, however otherwise educated or uneducated, wise or foolish, would question for a moment that this bill was a plain violation of the [state] constitutional prohibition [against contracting state debts for other than defense]. . . .

If the people’s “Thou shalt not” can be brushed aside by the simple ipso dixit of the public servants thus bound, the mandate is impotent. Such a construction, once adopted, breaks the barrier, and future legislatures, protected by precedent, might pile up mountains of debt on future generations, resulting in inevitable imporverishment or ruthless repudiation.[41]

It mattered not. The State governors persuaded the State legislatures and the President got his “broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency.” Almost immediately, the President’s “National Planning Board” began issuing circulars to the States. The fifth of these letters, on December 11, 1933, called for the creation of State planning boards. These would oversee the implementation of Federal guidelines for public works, land use planning, zoning, use of rural lands, transportation, agriculture, housing, population redistribution (yes, that’s the government telling you that you have to leave your property and move were they tell you, trail of tears style), conservation, water resources, recreation, fiscal programming, and more. The circular stated, “A full fledged state planning project will eventually include all of these items, and others as well.”[42]

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A later letter from Kansas Governor Landon to the Chancellor of the University of Kansas reveals it was not all purely political. As we have seen so many times in this study, particularly with education, banking, tariffs, money, and war, there were corporate and religious-ideological forces at work as well. Landon says in his letter, “We are of course dependent on the National Resources Board and the Spelman Fund for the continuance of effective work.”[43] The Spelman Fund was a Rockefeller Oil endowment directed by Beardsley Ruml, who along Elihu Root is among the most influential men you’ve never heard of— a psychologist of the behaviorist school, a leader at the University of Chicago, a Macy’s executive, and after serving as a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of NY, became the Ben Bernanke of his day and chaired it. In 1942, he invented income tax withholding so that average people would not feel the pain of writing a single, large, year-end check to the government. Taxing in small increments creates less resistance and allows the government 1) to take more in the long run, and 2) to bank and to earn interest on what they collect in the mean time.

Meanwhile, the history of the Progressive era, as we saw, was one of empire and corporate growth, and Rockefeller was one of the kings, if not the king. After a coal mine strike at Colorado (involving workers from one of Rockefeller’s mines) led to a massacre of miners courtesy of the National Guard (Sherman would be proud), Rockefeller took the national lead in calling for increased employee benefits, protections, wage protections, and representation. The so-called “Colorado Plan” became something of a blueprint for centrally planned “Industrial Relations” as Rockefeller funded programs in several major universities throughout the nation.[44] The following section from Schroder and Schechter is worth its length for its incisive summary:

Princeton, Yale, Harvard, and Columbia were heavily funded by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., but the political science department at the University of Chicago, under the leadership of Charles E. Merriam and Beardsley Ruml, became the headquarters for the new “science” of industrial relations. Whether the increased cost of providing for laborers’ “human weaknesses” would be offset by increased profits turns out to be immaterial. If government could provide these benefits, at no cost to the corporations, any increased productivity would be a windfall profit to the corporate owners. It was this goal that the Rockefeller interests pursued through their foundations, university funding, and government collaborations, and that they ultimately achieved in 1933. The only problem to be overcome was the peacetime constitutional limitations on government to create money and “tax and spend” at will. President Roosevelt, the Congress, and the states solved this problem on March 9, 1933, by declaring that a state of national emergency existed, thereby eliminating prior constitutional restraints. . . .

The first hundred days of the Roosevelt administration were by and large no more than an implementation of the Rockefeller “Colorado Plan” by the national government in cooperation with the state and local governments, with purported constitutional authority under a state of declared national emergency that previously had been assumed to apply only in wartime.[45]

Indeed, one Rockefeller-funded adviser of FDR briefed him nearly a year before his presidency, stating for a fact that corporations we already in control: “65% of American industry is owned and operated by about six hundred corporations.” He would go on to praise this as an opportunity to advance toward Soviet-style socialism: “at the present rate of the trend, the American and Russian systems will look very much alike within a comparatively short period—say twenty years. . . . [For] there is no great difference between having all industry run by a committee of Commissars and by a small group of Directors.” Thus is was advised to be made part of FDR’s campaign that the Corporate-State should set up “monopolies at will” and “should include power to require uniform prices; to control security issues; and to control further consolidation.”[46]

On the same day he declared the national emergency, the Emergency Banking Act gave FDR total control of national finance. He declared a bank holiday and forbid redemption of paper for gold. A month later he confiscated the nation’s gold coins from all private individuals at the set price of $20.67/oz. A year later he declared the price to $35/oz. which effectively inflated the money supply by 70 percent (or decreased the nation’s debt burden by that amount, depending on how you look at it). Out of this same emergency atmosphere came the Emergency National Industry Recovery Act which exempted corporations from anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws, a central National Resources Board, the Home Owners’ Loan Act, the Emergency Relief Act, the Social Security Act, and the Emergency Agricultural Adjustment Act which placed national controls on farms, prices, etc.

A similar spirit has prevailed ever since. What President Clinton did in Kosovo via executive orders and declared national emergencies was already long-since the norm for advancing central planning and political agendas. Presidents today regularly use emergency powers in both war and peace to expedite agendas under the guise of “governing effectively,” “national security,” and many other justifications.

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Conclusion

While there is certainly no limit to the tyranny of an Executive who has both the ambition and opportunity, there is enough here to show how a once freer America has been subdued. This has come primarily through three key Executive powers: the Treaty-making power in this country, the abuse of executive orders, and the ascendancy of government-by-emergency. We have seen how the latter of these has been the main catalyst for executive tyranny, especially in more recent times, and also as it unleashes the greater potential for the abuse of executive orders.

The greatest irony of all here is that, of all tyrannies and abuses, Americans are most complacent with this one being abused. This may not be true considering the allure of public schooling and welfare checks, but consider for a moment how broadly these Executive excesses have been indulged by both Republican and Democrat administrations in recent times. And in either instance, the partisans of either party praise the abuses of their party and condemn those of the opponents. The message is clear: “we will tolerate Executive tyranny as long as our guys gets to stick it to the other party.” Understandably, the two major political parties in this nation have become merely two expressions of big government Executive tyranny. The one says give us protections for social welfare programs, the other says give us protections for corporate banks and big business. Both love war. In short, there seems to be no escape from this game of big spending and massive debts: it only seems to be a matter of who gets to profit on the front end.

But there is an alternative worldview. While change in the executive functions of our governments—especially at the federal level—is definitely a long way off barring some major collapse and catastrophe, there are still some goals at which to aim. We will discuss these in the next section.

1. Quoted in the Congressional Research Service’s Annotated Constitution, http://www.law.cornell.edu/anncon/html/art2frag14_user.html#art2_hd65 (accessed January 11, 2012).
2. http://www.senate.gov/reference/glossary_term/quorum.htm (accessed January 11, 2012.
3. The Founders’ Constitution, 4:36.
4. Quoted in The Founders’ Constitution, 4:38; cf. Farrand’s Records, 2:639.
5. Quoted in The Founders’ Constitution, 41.
6. Quoted in The Founders’ Constitution, 4:41; cf. Storing, 2:293.
7. Quoted in The Founders’ Constitution, 4:41; cf. Storing, 2:293.
8. Quoted in The Founders’ Constitution, 4:50; cf. Elliot’s Debates, 3:503.
9. Quoted in the Congressional Research Service’s Annotated Constitution, http://www.law.cornell.edu/anncon/html/art2frag16_user.html#art2_hd71 (accessed January 11, 2012).
10. Treaties in Force: A List of Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States in Force on January 1, 2011, http://www.state.gov/s/l/treaty/tif/index.htm (accessed January 11, 2012).
11. “Project on International Small Arms Control Standards, Phase 2” May 4, 2010; http://www.un-casa-isacs.org/isacs/Documents_files/ISACS%20Phase%202%20Project.pdf (accessed January 12, 2012).
12. “Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects,” http://www.poa-iss.org/PoA/poahtml.aspx (accessed January 12, 2012).
13. Colum Lynch, “US Puts Condition on Joining Talks on Conventional Arms Trade,” Washington Post, Oct. 16, 2009; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/15/AR2009101503659.html; also Maxim Lott, “Proposed U.N. Treaty to Regulate Global Firearms Trade Raising Concerns with U.S. Gun Makers,” August 5, 2011; http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/08/05/proposed-un-treaty-to-regulate-global-firearms-trade-raising-concerns-for-us/; and Larry Bell, “U.N. Agreement Should Have All Gun Owners Up In Arms,” June 7, 2011; http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2011/06/07/u-n-agreement-should-have-all-gun-owners-up-in-arms/ (all accessed January 12, 2012).
14. http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/index.shtml (accessed January 11, 2012).
15. Agenda 21, 251.
16. For the full narrative from which the above is taken, see “How the Convention on Biodiversity was Defeated,” http://sovereignty.net/p/land/biotreatystop.htm (accessed January 11, 2012).
17. Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 140 (Friday, September 30, 1994), http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-1994-09-30/html/CREC-1994-09-30-pt1-PgS22.htm (accessed January 11, 2012.
18. http://www.cbd.int/convention/parties/list/ (accessed January 11, 2012).
19. http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/.
20. http://www.i-c-e-l.org/english/EPLP31EN_rev2.pdf (see p. 2), (accessed January 11, 2012).
21. http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/executive-orders/pdf/12852.pdf (accessed January 11, 2012).
22. Revised Charter, April 25, 1997; http://clinton2.nara.gov/PCSD/Charter/index.html (accessed January 11, 2012); emphasis mine.
23. Agenda 21, 233.
24. Revised Charter, April 25, 1997; http://clinton2.nara.gov/PCSD/Charter/index.html (accessed January 11, 2012).
25. Henry Lamb, “The Convention on Biological Diversity: Cornerstone to the New World Order,” http://freedom.org/reports/srbio.htm (accessed January 11, 2012).
26. http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=1999_register&docid=fr08fe99-168.pdf (accessed January 11, 2012).
27. See Odd Terje Sandlund, Peter Johan Shei, and Aslaug Viken, eds., Invasive Species and Biodiversity Management (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999).
28. http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2011-06-14/pdf/2011-14919.pdf (accessed January 11, 2012).
29. Of course, not all orders are actual abuses. Many are exercises of powers already ceded to the President, and some are simply frivolous

    Some of these orders have been more important than others. In 1952, one of Eisenhower’s orders would have seized control of all steel mills in the country. The Supreme Court found this disturbing enough to review and shot it down. But in recent times, this type of check on presidential power is an rare exception to the rule—it has occurred only twice.

    In 1999, Bill Clinton essentially waged the war in Kosovo entirely by Executive Orders and without Congressional declaration of war. In Order No. 13088, Clinton declared the civil war in Kosovo a “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” and thus a “national emergency.” ((June 9, 1998, http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=1998_register&docid=fr12jn98-162.pdf (accessed January 13, 2012).

30. http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=1999_register&docid=fr16ap99-163.pdf (accessed January 13, 2012). The particular section in view is now 26 U.C.S. 112 and essentially provides a tax break for soldiers serving in undeclared wars, including serving in “combat zones.” The section defines “combat zone” as “any area which the President of the United States by Executive Order designates, for purposes of this section or corresponding provisions of prior income tax laws, as an area in which Armed Forces of the United States are or have (after June 24, 1950) engaged in combat” (27 U.S.C. 112(c)(2
31. See Cliff Kincaid, “How Clinton Waged War Through Executive Order,” http://www.usasurvival.org/kosovowar.html (accessed January 13, 2012).
32. Abraham D. Sofaer, “The War Powers Resolution and Kosovo,” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 34/1 (Nov. 2000): 75; http://llr.lls.edu/volumes/v34-issue1/sofaer.pdf (accessed January 13, 2012).
33. E.O. 13192, January 17, 2001; http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=2001_register&docid=fr23ja01-141.pdf (accessed January 13, 2012).
34. Emergency Power Statutes: Provisions of Federal Law Now in Effect Delegating to the Executive Extraordinary Authority in Time of National Emergency, quoted in Eugene Schroder and David E. Schechter, War, Central Planning and Corporations: The Corporate State (Cleburne, TX: Buffalo Creek Press, 1997), 11.
35. Harold C. Relyea, “National Emergency Powers,” Congressional Research Report, August 30, 2007, No. 98–505; http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/98-505.pdf (accessed January 16, 2012).
36. Emergency Power Statutes: Provisions of Federal Law Now in Effect Delegating to the Executive Extraordinary Authority in Time of National Emergency, quoted in Eugene Schroder and David E. Schechter, War, Central Planning and Corporations: The Corporate State (Cleburne, TX: Buffalo Creek Press, 1997), 11.
37. Harold C. Relyea, “National Emergency Powers,” Congressional Research Report, August 30, 2007, No. 98–505; http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/98-505.pdf (accessed January 16, 2012).
38. Quoted in Schroder and Schechter, War, Central Planning and Corporations, 29.
39. Quoted in Schroder and Schechter, War, Central Planning and Corporations, 30.
40. Schroder, 27–8.
41. Quoted in Schroder and Schechter, War, Central Planning and Corporations, 26–7.
42. Quoted in Schroder and Schechter, War, Central Planning and Corporations, 32.
43. Quoted in Schroder and Schechter, War, Central Planning and Corporations, 33.
44. See Rockefeller’s own description of the Colorado Plan in “John D. Rockefeller, Jr., on Labor and Capital,” New York Times, January 6, 1916; on the funding of programs see Schroder and Schechter, 42.
45. Schroder and Schechter, War, Central Planning and Corporations, 42–3.
46. Quoted in Schroder and Schechter, War, Central Planning and Corporations, 46.