Dr Greg Bahnsen - Law and Grace: Law and Disgrace (Part 2)

Isn't this fellowship great? Well, it's like that perfume that was poured upon Aaron's head, isn't it? That's just so sweet and lovely. If we're not ready to go to heaven after this weekend, I'll tell you. Thank you so much for having me and for being so kind to let me address you. It's always a great privilege to speak to the people of God. It's also a privilege to speak to those who aren't the people of God when the Lord has given you a message for them. But it's a real privilege and a joy to be with those who are the people of God and are of like mind with me. I want to give my congratulations to the Chalcedon Presbyterian Church. You're celebrating your 20th anniversary. I praise God for you and commend you. I also want to thank you. I think many of us who have gone through, well, ups and downs over the last 20 years have found it an encouragement that God has raised up a witness here in Atlanta. This congregation, he's blessed. You look at this wonderful building. You have the people, you have the talent that's here, the preaching from this pulpit. And I just pray that God will give you many more years to lead the way and set an example for us. Thank you for inviting me to your birthday party. I'm glad that I can be here, and I'd like to take the opportunity because I think it's appropriate that if we think about the 20 years of this congregation, we can think about 20 years and what is sometimes called the Christian Reconstruction movement. Now, I'm not going to mince words today. Those of you who have read no other standard know that I think technically there is no Reconstructionist movement if you speak in sociological terms. But there's certainly a Reconstructionist school of thought. And though it did not begin with the Chalcedon Presbyterian Church, the public recognition of that school of thought is not that far off from the beginning of this congregation in time. So this is an appropriate opportunity to not only be grateful to God for the 20 years you've had as a congregation, but also to stop and reflect upon the Reconstructionist school of thought movement, whatever you want to call it. The great theme in all of Protestant theology is law and grace. What is the relationship of law and grace? Many theologians have said, if you can get right on this subject, you've got your theology right. And if you depart from that topic of law and grace to that degree, you will depart from Orthodoxy as well. Well, I don't need to Come and speak three times to you on theonomy to tell you the theonomic view of law and grace. That would be carrying coal to Newcastle, wouldn't it? I'm sure you're familiar with the many books that have been put out not simply by myself but by others that God has raised up. You know what the thesis is and you know how it is to be defended. I will say in passing, even though I'm not going to go into the defense of it in an exegetical way, that the last 20, 25 years in my own career, God has given me increasing confidence that this thesis is correct. Most of you who know me publicly or from my writings or tapes and so forth don't know Greg Bonson when he was in seminary and is working out these views and throwing them up against his professors at Westminster Seminary and wondering, rightly so. I mean, I think students should be students and have the due humility of those who are in a being taught position. But you always wonder what is it because I'm not studied enough that I have not seen, that I have not considered what's behind the veil of ignorance in my life that may come out and say now this is what destroys this idea and so forth. Well, see, 20 years of being out on the road and defending this and taking the lumps and hearing what supposedly the scholars of our reformed and evangelical worlds have to say has done at least this for me. I am absolutely convinced this morning that if there are mistakes in the reconstructionist or theonomic outlook, they are not huge gargantuan mistakes that any child should be able to see. This is what our opponents will tell us, that we have missed it by a mile, not just some fine tuned detail. Well, I'm now convinced that if the finest that can be found outside of our school of thought cannot do any better than they have over the years, we should have a great deal of confidence, not in ourselves. But I thank God this is a thesis, I think, that is going to stand the test of time and I thank him for that. I don't want to get into the details of how I might answer my critics today and I don't want to bore you with going through just the vanilla thesis of theonomy over the next three opportunities. I have to speak for you, but I do want to address the theonomic thesis in a way that I hope will advance what we believe is the God's point of view with respect to morality and politics in this world. And I'd like to help us as Theonomists and Reconstructionists to come closer to walking with God in the way that he wants us to. And so I'd like to focus on the law with an interest on looking outside our movement. That's what I'm going to do in this lecture. And then tomorrow morning, looking inside this movement or school of thought, and then tomorrow evening, looking together, whether you're a theonomist or not, looking together at the question of the grace of law. This morning I want to look outside. I want to look, in a sense, at the law of God with respect to our opponents and what we might want to say to them, apart from just writing books and refutation of their arguments. And the title of this morning's message is Law and Disgrace. And then tomorrow morning, please pray for me. I have been in meditation and reflection on this for some time. What I might share, looking back at 20 years in the Reconstructionist movement, what might I be able to say in the short time that is there to ourselves, looking inside. And basically, if you can't be here, what I want to share with you is that it is not enough to have the law of God. I praise God for the law of God, but the law of God in the hands of fools will not help us. You will notice that when Solomon had the opportunity to ask one thing of God, Solomon did not ask for more law, of course, he had everything he needed in the law that Moses had given, Solomon asked for wisdom. And I want to pray that God will use that message to help us become wise in the use of God's law. And then together, whether we're theonomist or not. Tomorrow evening, I'd like for us to understand from a detailed exegetical study of the Old Testament that we have misconstrued the relationship of law and grace. Well, we go back 20 years. That's what I told you. Let me go back a decade beyond 20 years and remind you that song that Bob Dylan made famous, popularized by Peter, Paul and Mary, sung by Joan Baez, blowing in the wind, you know. How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? How many seas must the white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand? The last stanza has this line in it that I think is, how many times can a man turn his head and pretend he just doesn't see? And I'm going to be using that as a unifying theme for what I want to say to those outside the Reconstructionist school of thought and to those who are inside as well as I look outside. It seems to me that the anti theonomists are turning their heads from the ugly truth about the world. And though we may get into institutional politics and personal flaps and have difficulty living with one another, we may disagree over how we argue the case, how we exegete particular texts, and so forth. What I want to know from our opponents to the degree that they are brothers and sisters in Christ, I want to know how many times can a man turn his head and pretend he just doesn't see what's going on? I will address the same question to us tomorrow morning as we examine our own hearts and look in our own difficulties in living together in our own midst. How many times have we been turning our heads and pretending we don't see what everyone else can see about us and we are not addressing it? And if I do that in a way that brings conviction, you may not like me anymore, but I hope God will like what I have to say for you and all of us brothers and sisters in Christ, whether we call ourselves theonomist or not, all of us need a better view of what the law of God really means vis a vis his grace. Because apart from inner party rivalries, if we lose that, we've just lost what being a Christian is all about. So that's what I want to share with you this weekend. Time is short. I have learned over the years to talk more slowly. A few years in the south helped that, And now I'm going to fight against all that I've learned and have to fill your time with a lot of material because we don't get opportunities like this very often. And I want to share some things with you. What are the two major reasons why people tell me they oppose theonomy and Christian ethics? There are plenty. I've written a whole book, so it's much more than two. But if I were to boil it down to the two recurring major reasons why people cannot be theonomists, the first would be because we're not under law, but under grace. Romans 6:14, over and over and over again, and variations on it. But that's the central theme. We're not under law, we're under grace. And then as an application of that, I think more particularly, we're certainly not under those harsh, terrible laws about how society is to be governed and the civil magistrate is to punish criminal offenders. And so theonomy, if it has it wrong, if you listen to the popular mentality and the major reason why people will not go along with us, we have it wrong because we think we're under law rather than under grace. And we're so harsh as to think that our society should be governed by these penal sanctions of the Old Testament. And so what can we say? If we had two different schools of thought proposing how to build a neighborhood, and they had completely different views of how to engage in the building of the homes and the construction of the streets and all the other things that goes into building a neighborhood, you might, if you were in one school of thought over against the other and you're both trying to build your respective neighborhoods, you might from time to time go over and see one another and say, well, how's it going? Give me a progress report. So rather than doing exegesis and argument this morning, I'd just like to go over to the non theonomous neighborhood and say, how's it going? Give us an update on the world under your influence. How are things going in your churches? If we look back, way back beyond the 20th century, down through the years to the earliest days of the Christian Christian church, you'll see that the Christian church, in its very first heretical encounter, had to deal with the law and grace issue. Marcion, who died in 160 A.D. was the leader of a heretical sect in the early church. He had come to Rome about 140 A.D. four years after that, the church excommunicated him. According to Marcion, he maintained that the Gospel of Jesus Christ was entirely a gospel of love that excludes the Mosaic Law. His version of love was not subjective, it was not licentious. You need to understand that Marcy, in fact, was an ascetic. He believed in a very rigorous, narrow approach to life. But he believed that that approach to life was to be directed by New Testament texts only. And that led him into a severe ascetic lifestyle, very much like the Gnostics that despise the world and the flesh. Marcion felt that the original gospel had been corrupted by his day. We're talking about less than a hundred years and now already people are preaching sermons. We have to get back to New Testament Christianity. Have you heard that before? Marcion was saying that as well. He felt that the Judaizing tendencies in the early church had corrupted the disciples. They should have realized, he said, that the Old Testament has absolutely no validity for Christians. And it's only Paul, according to Marcion, who understood that correctly. And by the way, even Paul didn't get it right all the time. And so Marcion declared that the new covenant scripture is ten of the Epistles of Paul and the Gospel of Luke but only the Gospel with the Old Testament expurgated from it. And the Church had to respond to Marcion. This is the first major heresy that the Church addresses past the apostolic generation. And it's out of that confrontation that the Church made declaration for the first time of what it recognized to be the canon of Scripture. I think it's fascinating that if you understand church history, it was a theonomic motivation that led to the formation and public declaration of the New Testament canon. That's fascinating. The New Testament Church, the early Patristic Church, was not antagonistic to the Old Testament. And those who were antagonistic were deemed heretics. Boy, have we come a long way, baby. Now, those of us who are saying, let's not throw away the Old Testament, let's respect what God has said there, we now are called heretics. But back in the days of the early Church, the fathers of the Church spoke glowingly of the Old Testament, of the Mosaic Law, and of its civil application. I only have time for two quick illustrations. Clement of Alexandria spoke explicitly of, and now I'm quoting him, the harmony of the Law and the Gospel. He went on to extensively and in detail commend the virtue and the benefit of the case laws that were revealed by Moses. He claimed that the Mosaic Law was the fountain of all sound ethics. He said, it's far superior to the products of the best legislators of Greece. And now I'll quote him again. Now, Moses furnished a good polity, which is the right discipline of men in social life. He also handled the administration of justice, coordinate with it the faculty of dealing with punishments. In a word, the whole system of Moses is suited for the training of such as are capable of becoming good and noble men. But those who disbelieve and have shown a repugnance to engage in the works of the law, whoever else may certainly confess their ignorance of the truth. That's pretty strong words. Here we have one of the fathers of the Church saying, of course a civil polity should be fashioned after Moses. The Greek legislators couldn't possibly do any better than an inspired writer who speaks directly to the subject about how men should get along in society and deal with their problems. Well, that was long ago, right? It doesn't sound like the day in which we live. This is what sounds like the day in which we live. I'm going to quote Reinhold Niebuhr in an interpretation of Christian Ethics. Orthodox Christianity cannot come to the aid of modern man because its morality is expressed in dogmatic and authoritarian moral codes. You see that's the problem. We can't help modern men because we're all tied down to these dogmatic authoritarian codes. Rebellion is rooted in the heart of man. Man would be a law unto himself. It does not come to sinful fallen men naturally to submit to the dictates of their Creator, certainly not the dictates in an old fashioned discredited book. And so modern theologians, rather than fighting against the spirit of autonomy, have actually taken the spirit of autonomy to be the Christian outlook over against the oppressive attitudes that can be found in the world in various schools of philosophy. Graham de Graaf puts it this way. There is no room in morality for commands, whether they are the fathers, the schoolmasters or the priest. There's still no room for them when they are God's commands. Wolfhardenberg the proclamation of imperatives backed by divine authority is not very persuasive today. Well, thanks, Wolfhard. I wouldn't have ever guessed that modern theologians promote autonomy, not theonomy, autonomous autonomy in the name of Christian morality. Now there are some people in Reformed circles that have argued against an autonomous spirit. I think here of doyoubairt and his disciples, the cosmonomic school of thought. So you have autonomy, cosmonomic thinking, theonomy. Well, the cosmonomic thinkers have felt that the autonomous spirit is not at all appropriate to being a Christian. But on the other hand, they are not at all willing to go to the text of the Bible to find those laws by which we should live. They tell us we need an all embracing world and life view. They say that we should look to the relevance of God's Word. Be careful now, Word is not being used in the way you think we should look to the relevance of God's Word in all areas of life. But in the end we're disturbed to find that according to this school of thought, the specific textual teachings of Scripture, that's what you would have thought Word meant. The specific textual teachings of Scripture are locked out of social, economic, judicial, political theorizing that in fact, believe it or not, that's called a form of idolatry. Because the Word of God belongs in the box of ecclesiology. It belongs over here in the category the modality of faith. But it doesn't pertain to other things. And do you himself specifically called the attitude that wants to go to the text of the Bible for civil polity, Biblicism. And I now wear that tag with honor. I am a biblicist because if that's what you call it, so be It a rose by any other name smells as sweet. Nevertheless, there are those in reformed circles who want to fight autonomy, but they don't want to fight it with the specific text of Scripture. As you know, theonomic ethics recognizes the authority of God's word, God's written word, that it cannot be restricted to any narrow domain. But rather, as Paul says in second Timothy three, it is profitable for instruction in righteousness that equips a man for every good work. And now your choices logically are these. Politics is not a good work, in which case the Bible doesn't equip you for it because it's not a good work, or it is a good work and therefore, as Paul says, all of Scripture is profitable for it. There are no other options. It's theonomy or autonomy, plain and simple. Hendrik Hart, who was one of these cosmonomic thinkers, wrote in the Challenge of Our Age, biblical living can never be summed up in rules for faith and conduct, or faith and morals can never be summed up. Well, then there can never be a biblical faith that challenges our age. That's what I would say to Dr. Hart in response. Well, there are those who are closer to home, people who do have a respect for the text of God's Word, who nevertheless don't find what we are offering in theonomy or reconstructionism. Wholesome or good people who would continue to call us the heretics rather than the Marcians of our age. I think here of various forms of antinomianism.ff Bruce F. Written to the effect that Christian ethics is not characterized by external rules. Let me quote him. Not by external conformity to a written code, but by the impulsion of an inward power. God's people would do his will from the heart. Talk about false antithesis. You know, it's like you either got an external code or you got the inner work of the Spirit in your heart. Well, but his point is, if you really believe in spirit born living, if you're really going to be infused with the Spirit, then external codes of behavior have no place in Christian morality. Charles Ryrie, in a well known dispensational work, the End of the Law, writes that Christians are in law to Christ. They have law, but it is not the law of the old dispensation, that indeed unless something is repeated in the New Testament, it is not the law of the Christian man. I debated a leading dispensationalist a number of years ago. Many of you, I think, maybe have heard the debate. And so I asked a Simple question. Is bestiality then acceptable in the New Testament since it's not repeated in the New Testament now, you would think that is enough of a simple reductio ad absurdum to tell people, go back to the drawing boards. We obviously haven't got this worked out right. Dispensationalism, however, has simply maintained its opposition, in fact, has turned up the heat. I don't want to whine and complain, but I could tell you stories, I know Gary could, all of us could, about the things that are said and written about us by the people who can't even show that bestiality is immoral. Isn't that incredible? Likewise, Walter Martin opposes the Reformation endorsement of the Mosaic Law when he wrote, the Great Imperative of love suspends the whole law. He says we have to be careful to observe, though, that Christians do observe law. And so then he asks, which law? And he tells us that the reformers who suggested the Mosaic Law along with the rest of the Bible, we're guilty of, and I'm quoting, an unchristian and unbiblical concept which we repudiate with abject horror. Well, so when we get over to the other neighborhood, what I hear is people saying, you are a heretic, Dr. Bonson. We reject what you're saying with abject horror. Horror that is unchristian, that is unbiblical. And so we have in the evangelical world, and we have in the Reformed world today, the ascendancy of Marcion and the rejection of the earliest church and I believe, of the Bible itself with respect to the validity of God's law. John Murray wrote once, it's symptomatic of a pattern of thought current in many evangelical circles, that the idea of keeping the commandments of God is not consonant with the liberty and spontaneity of the Christian man, that keeping the law has its affinities with legalism and with the principle of works rather than with the principle of grace. And then he adds in one hammer blow of a sentence. It is strange indeed that this kind of antipathy to the notion of keeping commandments should be entertained by any believer who is a serious student of the New Testament. Well, you know, I agree with that. How's it going? Well, how's it going? We're being told that we have no idea what we're doing. We're going to destroy the church, we're going to destroy true Christianity in the individual's heart, that we are going to ruin society, that these are dangerous notions, that we are new ayatollahs and on and on it goes. Okay, well, I told you I wouldn't sit here and just, you know, argue point by point in exegesis. I just want to visit the other neighborhood and say, well, then, how's it going? Give us a progress report on what it is to uphold the grace of God as you understand the grace of God. After a generation of allegedly predicted protecting the grace of God and the freedom of the Christian man from the law of God. How's it going outside our circles? What kind of influence is the church? Up to 35% of people in the United States claim to be not just Christians, evangelical Christians. It's 70 to 80% who will tell you they are Christians. But let's say, okay, we know better than that. But those who know to call themselves fundamentalist evangelical reform, over a third of our nation will profess that. So how's it going out there where the grace of God is being protected against us ayatollahs in this world? That's all I want to share with you this morning, a little progress report. How about in psychology? Listen to this. Broderick Chisholm, director of the World Health Organization, and I quote, the belated objectives of practically all affected psychotherapy are the reinterpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong. If the race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good and evil, it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility. An outright declaration that we cannot solve man's personal psychological problems of the soul. We cannot solve those problems. Problems unless we eradicate the notion of right and wrong. So how are our brothers and sisters in Christ in the other neighborhood doing and holding the world back from running completely into the autonomy that now there is no right and wrong? How's it going in education? I quote Irving Kristol from the Wall Street Journal, 1987. He says, One might think that knowing right from wrong is not so remarkable as to merit combination comment. But in fact, there are two major institutions in our society where such knowledge is regarded with suspicion and distrust. The first consists of the media. The other is our universities, which cheerfully allow that they are much too sophisticated to know right from wrong and regard any claim to such knowledge with disdain. Might I say in passing, you might hope that he's speaking tongue in cheek. He is not. This is the literal, observational, descriptive truth. You will be sneered at at the modern university if you so much as presume that there is a right and wrong about which you could speak. It's not that you're mistaken in your view of right and wrong. It's that you think that there is such a thing. What a child. Once upon a time, Crystal says, practically all all colleges and universities insisted on their right to dismiss a faculty member for moral turpitude. That phrase and the concept itself are now dismissed as archaic remnants of an unenlightened age. Our universities don't know what moral turpitude is. They teach that an educated person should find it presumptuous to claim to know what moral turpitude is. So how's it going out there where the grace of God is being protected against the law? How's it going in psychology and in education? James Patterson and Peter Kim, in the 1992 book the Day America Told the Truth, write. The overwhelming majority of people, 93%, said that they and nobody else determine what is and what is not moral in their lives. They base their decisions on their own experience, even on their daily whims. 93% of the people with whom we live think that right and wrong is based on what they feel and experience. And so how is it going with respect to freedom in our society today, where the grace of God has been stripped free of this terrible theonomic notion of the law of God? Well, what we see is a hypocritical demand in our society. Freedom for minorities, freedom for women, freedom for homosexuals, freedom for political dissidents, but not freedom for Christian schools. Now there we have the right to step in and tell you, don't you dare have the idea of right and wrong. Freedom in our day and age? What about the utter invasion of property and freedom that is practiced weekly, practiced daily by the irs? Where are the men in the other neighborhood who are standing up for the freedom of their people against that kind of tyranny? Freedom in our day and age without the law of God, when we have so many market restrictions, rent controls, so much so that I had to go up to Chico a few years ago, the only Presbyterian they could find who would. Who would speak in behalf of Evelyn Smith because she wouldn't rent her duplex to an unmarried couple because she thought they were living in sin. And so the state stepped in and brought charges against her to force her to do that. That's what freedom means when the law of God has been dismissed. How about the church and state? How are we doing in that area? Well, we see in our country freedom for all religions, don't we? People are just going out of their way to make sure the Muslims have their freedom. Freedom for all religions but of course that means in the public schools, freedom from all religion. In the courts, how's it going where the grace of God has been protected? And we don't want to look at that archaic law of God. Do you remember the shameless fiasco of the Clarence Thomas hearings when he was to be appointed to the Supreme Court? I don't particularly care whether he was guilty or not guilty of the charges brought against him by his opponent. That is not the issue. What is shameless to me is that even in a setting where we have legislators and the issue is the Supreme Court, we have no idea what the law of God says at the mouth of two or three witnesses and every charge will be established. Do we ever have the feeling, you know, when everything else fails, go back to the instructions. Our society in the freedom of the grace that is promoted in our churches has become characteristically litigious in its outlook. All of us have become victims. Not free, free people victims. Look at the disrespect for property and honesty all about you. The Josephson institute survey of 9,000 young people published two years ago informs us that 33% of high school students admitted to shoplifting in the past year. One in three. Nearly two thirds of high school students had cheated on an exam in the past year. 20% of college students openly say they would falsify a report to help keep their job. But boy, we're making sure the grace of God and the freedom of the Christian man is being protected, aren't we? Patterson and Kim in the Day America told the truth, 1992, 74% said they would steal from those who wouldn't really miss it. Huge number. 3 in 4 people say stealing is fine as long as I perceive it wouldn't hurt the other person. 64% said they would lie when it suited them if it wouldn't cause real harm. 53% said they would cheat on their spouse. 53%. And the reason given because they figured their spouse was cheating on them anyway. 50% admitted it was standard operating procedure to procrastinate on the job so that they figured they really do about four days work for every five they're paid. How's it going over in the other neighborhood? What about disrespect for life? We could talk about abortion. You know the sickening statistics. Has the Christian church done a good job of being a city set on a hill? Is it now the light that scatters the darkness when it preaches a grace that's devoid of the law of God, devoid of any notion of sanctification. Our genocide of the unborn has made Hitler's campaign against the Jews pale into a minor crime by comparison. Within 48 hours of taking the oath of office, President Clinton moved to ease and lift restrictions on abortion in this country. He openly supports the Freedom of Choice Act. Think about the euthanasia that's being promoted and practiced in our country. Look at the widespread violence all about us. Note the hatred and the bigotry that's openly promoted in rap music, Killing of police, beating your bitch, getting niggers out of the way. Openly, explicitly. Those are the sorts of things that used to be said in whispers behind people's backs and now we sing it. So how's it going over in the other neighborhood where the grace of God has been stripped free of the Mosaic Law? Secular culture gladly stood by when promiscuity and profanity were openly endorsed and piety was sneered at, since those sorts of things were conservative values. And now liberals in our culture are standing aghast at the values of civilized society being eaten away. Love for neighbor is not there anymore. Equal treatment for all is not there. Respect for truth and learning is not there. Concern for life and property is not there. All of them eaten away by the acids of modernity and relativism. What's the problem? William Kirkpatrick, education professor at Boston College, notes that nearly 3 million crimes are committed on or near school property. About 135,000 students carry guns to school every day. And 21% of all secondary students avoid using school restrooms as they will put down in private because they fear intimidation or harm. Now, what is happening to our world, friends, while we've been beating up on these heretic theonomists? Disrespect for sexual purity. Think about homosexuality alone. One of my students at the study center has written me a term paper in response to the pressure being exerted by the federal government to ban any kind of discrimination against homosexuals in the workplace. The Office of Personnel Management has ordered that sexual orientation is protected under the Civil Service Service Reform act of 1978. The Department of Transportation officially sponsors Gay Pride Day. Pro homosexual literature is distributed at exhibitions sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services. The Department of Education lists in its newsletter section on marriages homosexual commitment services. The Department of Housing and Urban Development requires management level staff to participate in outside organizations which promote cultural diversity, including homosexual organizations. What is happening while we in our churches are promoting the grace of God devoid of law? Are you aware of all these things? Well, kind of. In an uneasy Nauseating way. You know that out there, things are not good. I'm trying to give you some detailed focus on this so you might understand why it is we take the heat to defend theonomy in our day. For the first time in history, a US President has spoken openly in favor of tolerance for sexual perversity and has campaigned for easier treatment of homosexuals in the military. Time would escape me if I were to speak to you about widespread divorce, our culture in our churches, the lifestyle of adultery and fornication which is taken for granted on the tv. You see, I've lived through this generation. I remember when the TV just started gently suggesting these sorts of things. And now it is taken for granted that young people who go out on a date need some kind of sexual protection. Ha ha ha. In all of our sitcoms. Well, of course I offended by the specific, but what really takes me back is that this is just part of our lifestyle now. So gracious and free. Has it become pornography? Can you send your children to the market to have them even buy some bread and milk because of what they're going to see displayed at the front counter? Rape. A UCLA psychologist interviewed 288 freshman males asking if they would commit a rape if they knew for sure they could get away with it. One in four said that he would. If he knew that he could get away with it, he would not hesitate to rape his date. And how about this area of crime and punishment, the real offense of theonomy? You know, I've had people tell me from time to time, I really am glad, Dr. Bonson, that you brought attention to the authority of the Old Testament. Testament. We need to pay more attention to it. And, you know, we need to pay more attention to how God directs our lives. But I really don't think you're right to think that we can apply those laws for our society. We wouldn't want crime to be punished in the way that the Bible says, well, okay, let's visit the other neighborhood. How's it going out there with respect to crime and punishment? Do the police usually get their man today? You might think so if you watch the TV. Well over 30 shows having to do with police drama or private investigators. But if you believe that the police get their man, you'd be living in the fantasy world of TV. John Perry reports in Pillars for 1994 that 14 million crimes were reported in 1992. 14 million, of which 2 million were for violent felonies. Of that total, only 742,000 arrests were made, of which 410,000 served prison time for their crimes. You think the police get their man? Why even bother to call the cops? In 1981 in New York City, the Chief of Detectives, James Sullivan announced that the police would not be able to investigate burglaries unless the property was worth more than $5,000 that which was taken. Is it any surprise then that after he made that announcement, burglary complaints for the year jumped 12% and there was only one arrest, not conviction. Only one arrest for every 11 burglary reports. See, the police told the criminals, we can't give up with you. And they said, thank you. They began to eat away all the more. Don't make the mistake of presuming that violent crime rates just automatically and always go up from year to year. By the way, you see, most of our lifetime we've seen that happen and so we just take it for granted. Well, of course crime is going to keep going up. That's plainly wrong. If you study. In 1961, the murder rate was half of what it had been in 1933. From 1933 to 1961, the murder rate went down 50%. About that time, penalogical theories were embraced having to do with the rehabilitation of criminals. Social theorists and psychologists turned our attention to the alleged root cause of crime, like poverty, environment and so forth. And guess what? Ideas have consequences. Murder had gone down 50% in 30 years. And from 1960 to 1976, a person's statistical chances of becoming a victim of violent crime tripled. We cut it in half in 30 years and tripled it in 15. Ideas have consequences. The Sentencing Project, a non profit group in Washington D.C. released a report in this year with comparative figures on incarceration. The US now has the highest rate in its history for imprisonment. Only Russia out of the countries of the world has a slightly higher percentage of its population in prison. Since 1980, the inmate population in the United States has doubled. And you'll note, you'll be astounded at what the prisons are costing our society. We really don't have time to go into all of these details. Do you get my point? To all of these disgraceful indicators of the immorality of our culture, I add with with alarm the statistical report that 35% of the people in our country claim to be evangelical Christians. They have so protected the grace of God that our world has turned into disgrace. This world, published by the American Enterprise Institute, reports in its issue for summer of 1982 on a poll taken taken by the Roper Organization on the political and Economic opinions of over 1100 seminary professors in America, 64% of which claim that the Bible is infallible. To the question, do you think the Bible offers a blueprint for the ideal social system or not? 77% of them said no. Is that an accident? Is it an accident that the statistical study of crime and immorality in our country is going sky high at the same time that the theologians of our country say, of course there's nothing in the Bible about how our society should be governed? George Gallup reported that among evangelical Christians, less than half of them could listen to five of the Ten Commandments. Hey, but that's good news. Surely the grace of God's not being weighed down with the Mosaic Law. They don't even know five of the Ten Commandments. Back in 1988, I read that Jimmy Swaggart was planning to publish a periodical entitled Sound Doctrine. Boy, is that an ironic sound doctrine. In order to counteract Dominion theology. And before he could get around to publishing how terrible our theology was, his own personal antinomianism scuttled the project. Less likely to be openly noticed are the numerous cases of dishonesty, abortion, adultery, and even homosexuality which are festering in our evangelical, fundamentalist and reformed churches. Mel White recently declared his homosexuality. He had been a ghostwriter for Jerry Falwell. James Davidson, a sociologist, has compiled depressing statistics on the lifestyles of young adults associated with our evangelical colleges and institutions, only to find that there is no significant statistical difference between fornication, abortion, homosexuality between the evangelical colleges and their secular counterparts. In any number of surveys, we find that Christians and non Christians respond in essentially the same way and in the same numbers. In answering questions about greed, about hedonism, about racism. At Calvin College, the faculty has widely decried and condemned a student group for bringing a speaker to campus and who spoke against the immorality of homosexual While a professed homosexual minister was quite welcome to speak in the college chapel, Norman Geisler, one of the leading critics of the heresy of poor Dr. Bonson, has this question asked, shall we get back to our Christian heritage? His answer is, God forbid. You see, friends, our culture is more going to hell in a handbasket, and the church is following right along with it. If you sincerely try to stand against the slide into the cesspool of wickedness in our state, in our culture, by looking for a consistent biblical position from which you might witness against the disgrace all around us, as many of us have found, you'll lose your job within the seminary community. You'll lose your Standing in the church establishment, you'll virtually become unemployable. Even if you're orthodox, you'll become ostracized. You'll be called dangerous. What's wrong with us that theonomists are dangerous when we have to lock our windows at night? It's crazy, isn't it? How many times can a man turn his head and pretend he just doesn't see? Of all the wicked heresies and threatening movements facing the church in our day, when Westminster Seminary finally organized their faculty to write something in unison, they gave their determined political efforts not to fight socialism, not to fight homosexuality, not abortion, not crime and mayhem in our society, not subjectivism and theology, not dispensationalism, not cultural relativism, not licentiousness, not defection from the New Testament, not defection from the Westminster Confession of Faith, all of which are out there. And they could give their legitimate efforts to. Boy, the thing they had to write about was theonomy. How many times can a man turn his head and pretend he doesn't see we are living in the cesspool of relativism? And the church doesn't have an answer. Well, I praise God not for my work. I think it's the grace of God that allows me to have this ministry. But I praise God that the truth that the early church knew and that is found in the Bible is available to us. And there are people like you who are willing to say, we'll pay the price. It's worth it. Gordon Reed, posting an article from Reformed Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, begins by noting the Los Angeles riots as a, quote, grim reminder that our nation and our whole way of life is seriously threatened by a growing tide of lawlessness. I began to read that and I say, praise God. Forget my background with the Reformed Seminary. I'm so glad. So I begin to read this article. You look at the LA riots and you say, lawlessness is all around us. What can we do about it? And the purpose of the article, when you get to the end, is to make sure we know that we're not under the judicial law of Moses. How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see? I submit to you that by opposing the law of God in the late 20th century, the church continues to be salt which has lost its savor in a decaying world. We deserve to be cast out and trodden under the feet of men in the name of protecting the grace of God against those who promote the moral validity of anybody else's opinion rather than what God has said in his Holy Commandments. The Church has turned the grace of God into disgrace. It's become guilty of complicity with the lawlessness of our world. And for a generation, reconstructionism has forcefully challenged the world and the drifting church to recognize the necessity of God's revealed law if we would somehow avert a plunge into the moral license and social chaos which is right in front of us unless we turn our heads and pretend we don't see. Jude verses 3 and 4 says, Beloved, while I was giving all diligence to write unto you of our common salvation, I was constrained to write unto you, exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints. For there are certain men crept in privately, those who were of old, of beforehand unto this condemnation written, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness. How's it going in the other neighborhood? My word for those who oppose what I have written and my brothers have written for what you believe when they call us heretics, my word to them is, you have turned the grace of God into disgrace. May God save us all.