The Lord hath established his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom ruleth over all.
Psalm 103:19
The whole world natural . . . signifies the whole world politic . . .
Newton, Observations, op cit., p. 5
The Moral Government of God
Dr. Harry Conn – known in his time as a “Who’s Who” in science and technology (cf. The Four Trojan Horses of Humanism, 1977, 1982) – was also a gifted lay theologian and lecturer during the latter half of the 20th Century. He, along with his colleague, Gordon C. Olson, (also a retired engineer) revived the works of the renown revival preacher from the 19th Century – Charles G. Finney. These men served as sort of an “underground” spiritual renewal movement through their “Men for Missions” organization and impacted groups such as Youth With A Mission and small Arminian denominations. Over the decades, Conn would also use his numerous university lecture tours on STEM topics as a platform to introduce tech students to 19th Century, Evangelical concepts.
Prior to these men, expressions like “the father heart of God,” “having a relationship with God,” “cheap grace and easy believeism,” “the kingdom of God is a monarchy,” and many others were not a part of Evangelical jargon. Conn was a wordsmith of pithy sayings and many of them ended up in what became the movement’s unofficial primer: The God They Never Knew (1978) by George Otis, Jr. But the penultimate label – which was derisively attached to their movement as a cultic brand by ignorant churchmen – was that of the “Moral Government of God.”
[It ought to be appreciated that Conn earned disdain for opposing popular Evangelical movements at the time, such as Bill Gothard’s “chain of command/spiritual covering” ideology, but also for opposing pet doctrines among the burgeoning Charismatics (i.e. the “Shepherding” movement and extreme perfectionist cults which relied on miraculous “sign” revelations for personal guidance or which sought the prophetic ability to “hear the voice of God.”]
Doctrinal fanaticism among Evangelical Christians has often taken the form of “mob psychology” and led them to become the great censors of religious history. Conn and Olson were banned from many churches, never mind that “Moral Government” was taught in almost every American seminary from the time of Jonathan Edwards until the Progressive Era following the Civil War. It was then that Evangelicals turned inward and decided that the notion of “moral government” was a liberal doctrine. It was lumped in with “the Social Gospel” and shunned to protect their flocks from Satan’s “deceptions.” Evangelicals might whine about Liberal censorship, but churchists have been the greatest censors now for two thousand years.
The core doctrine of the “Moral Government of God” is that unlike the rest of creation which is governed according to the natural law of “cause and effect,” moral, sentient beings are ultimately governed according to influence and sanctions. Moral action is predicated upon the concept of “free will” in the sense that real choices are made in the light of expected results: good or bad. God governs the “moral” kingdom of “free moral agents” with the threat or promise of rewards and punishments. Human action is itself properly “self-caused” action.
STEM students (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) could appreciate the distinction Conn drew between the “cause and effect” of the physical kingdom from that of “influence” in the moral kingdom. Physical law was a rule of action while moral law was a rule for action.
This distinction between the physical realm and the moral realm was anticipated by Isaac Newton who observed that human action does not seem to occur as an “equal and opposite reaction” to something else. There is a mysterious power with which all sentient beings seem to be endowed: the power to reject the stronger influence. That is why outcomes are not always predictable.
As noted above, in prophecy he believed “the natural world” is symbolic of the “world politic” by which he meant the moral kingdom. In his time, “politic” meant “the people” – (i.e. polis after the manner of Greek city-states) – which are governed according to their higher endowments and their rights as citizens to “self-rule.” The first ten pages of Newton’s book (Observations on Daniel and the Apocalypse, 1733) are dedicated to relating examples of these analogies, and further emphasizes “prophecy” in the sense of “warnings” against disobedience which become predictable outcomes:
The predictions of things to come relate to the state of the Church in all ages. . .
Newton, Ibid. p. 5
But Newton’s heirs in science did not follow in his path. Instead, they sought for an ever more refined physical cause for every human action, which as one philosopher once claimed: “The mind secretes thought just as the liver secretes bile.”
The secularists sought the cause of human action in human psychology or other physiological factors – the cause and effect of physical laws. Likewise, the Fundamentalists sought the same thing in the “power of the Holy Spirit” to overcome “the sin nature.” The combination of a secular and religious interpretation of “moral” law as just a different form of physical law ultimately impacted society to produce generations of victims. Human action could be blamed on something else – maybe not on “the devil made me do it” but on other factors such as mental illness, Original Sin, or social conditioning. Secularists prefer to live in a virtual reality of animation, shamanism, and drugs, while the Christians indulge causative factors derived from their battle between the “sin nature” and the “indwelling of the Holy Spirit.”
Moral Government doctrine has to do with the part of God’s kingdom which governs beings endowed with moral agency. Christ’s kingdom parables (e.g. Matthew Ch. 13, 25 et al) are illustrative of this doctrine because they present a sequence of first, moral choices and then, consequences or sanctions for those choices. Jesus introduces each parable with “The kingdom of heaven is like unto” and then relates the analogy.
Providential Government
Moral Government theologians drew a further distinction between two kinds of sanctions: 1) Governmental consequences and 2) Natural consequences. A natural consequence might be the defiance of gravity in jumping off a cliff. The results are predictable as outcomes of a human action, but do not represent a special, providential intervention by a deity. God does not hate you just because He did not suspend the law of gravity to spare you the consequences of the fall.
What might be governmental consequences, on the other hand, are sometimes hard to recognize. As expected, “governmental” consequences would refer to Divine interventions in history. Moral agency is suspended while Divine judgment is imposed. This is not to be confused with the human institutions which enforce moral law: such as governments which might impose the death penalty for murder, for example.
[As this doctrine has been handled by Evangelicals, the “doctrine of Providential Government” has served as a theological Trojan horse which has undone Moral Government teaching. As will be explained in the next installment, “the indwelling of the Holy Spirit” and “signs divination” have replaced the normal quest for right choices based upon correct information. In “yielding to the Holy Spirit” Evangelicals adopt a world view advocating for a “surrender” of moral action, which while an obvious oxymoron, nevertheless becomes a backdoor remedy to another causation for moral action: Original Sin. Man’s moral agency is the thing that is evil because it is fallen. Evangelical religion reeks of mysticism.]
Providential Government refers to Divine intervention to force an outcome, such as the “hardening of the heart of Pharaoh” so that God would have justification to impose the Plagues of Egypt.
The Bible claims that world catastrophes, such as Noah’s Flood or the Plagues of Egypt, were acts of Divine intervention in human history. “Providential Government” then becomes a worldview which believes that God is active in history and in our personal lives, working miracles in answer to prayer and “guiding” the flow of human action, especially collective, human action.
But it could be argued, as some natural philosophers have done – such as Immanuel Velikovsky – that these Providential events in history were not Divine interventions at all, but rather represent an attempt by the survivors to explain why they got lucky.
A third view might be that these natural cataclysms were exploited by a favored remnant who benefited from the prescient warnings of a friendly Deity. The ceremonial “closing of the door of the Ark” or “striking the Nile” with Moses’ staff may please the fantasies of the religious bard or Hollywood reenactments, but closer readings of the text reveal a time delay between these ceremonial invocations and the onslaught of the respective catastrophe. (See Pesher).
[Furthermore, the geological record indicates Earth catastrophes which occurred prior to human habitation. Genesis 1-2 suggests as much, in which the Creator finds a post-cataclysmic environment requiring a new creation.]
Regardless, returning to the Parables (developed further in the next installment), they are amillennial in the sense that specific choices must be followed by their appropriate and specific consequences. Moral Government exists irrespective of a “goal” to history. But because “sanctions” encourage one sort of choices over another, the Postmillennialist would argue that – given enough time – history will reflect some sort of predetermined outcome. In the Postmillennialist’s world view, the universe is rigged to favor covenant keepers. There must be a positive, reinforcing, memory loop which makes the advancement of civilization possible. Cycles of Divine “visitations” imposing sanctions must occur, otherwise, there can be no growth in civilization. But somehow, the favored righteous must be exempted from these calamities, otherwise, no one is left alive to learn from the moral lesson.
Concurrent with this ongoing supernatural interference in human history, the dominating reinforcing memory loop is a law of entropy upon human action: in theology, we call it Original Sin.
Can such a downward spiral be overcome?
Millennial Views Further Contrasted
The previous installment presented the case that each age of apostasy has been worse than the one before it – as characteristic of the Historicist’s View of the Great Tribulation (spanning at least 1,260 years). We might call it amillinnialism or better, “retro-millennialism,” because civilization seems to worsen. Each advancement in technology only empowers the race with a greater ability of self-destruction.
The contrasting alternative would be the postmillennial position which believes that each age of apostasy represents a weaker rebellion. In either case, Moral Government doctrine would teach that humanity experiences a process of ethical development: from a condition of subconscious non-awareness to one of total self-consciousness.
To briefly summarize the three main millennial positions:
Postmillennialism believes in a “consummation” of history in which it progresses without the aid of discontinuous events, unless they happen to be governmental sanctions inflicted for pedagogical purposes as just mentioned.
Amillennialism believes that the end of history is arbitrary and unrelated to whatever progress or regress which may have been attained by the human species.
Premillennialism believes the success of God’s kingdom requires the suspension of moral government, of an overriding of human moral agency and an apocalyptic imposition of the will of God on Earth.
While a Postmillennialist might be interested in evangelism, world missions, and revivals because he sees these as tools to change the world and usher in the Kingdom of Christ, the Premillennialist is only interested in a perfunctory obligation of “giving every human a chance at eternal salvation” while the assumption is that these efforts will ultimately fail: “for narrow is the way.” They encourage the convert to “abandon self-will” with “Choose Christ, and He will take care of the rest.”
There is a short bridge from Premillennialism to Amillennialism because the Amillennialist does not care much about revivals and evangelism, either. The Church is just a place for personal moral development with an eternity in Heaven as the only real value.
But just like a growing season, plants adapt their growth and maturity to match their climate’s limitations. Likewise with mankind, there may be an internal clock within the human propensity to create civilizations. Such civilizations reach their “maturity” when they achieve ethical self-consciousness in which their first principles are manifested in the “casuistry” of their respective institutions. This maturity or “ripeness” coincides with geophysical cycles in which human institutions are put to the test.
Did Newton Believe in Progress?
In light of a 2046AD eschaton event which involves an astrophysical catastrophe (solar nova), such a discontinuous event would occur irrespective of whether the human race is worthy or ready for the encounter. It represents the end of the growing season for the wheat and the tares without consideration of whether there was enough time for them to reach their maturity. For the postmillennial view to succeed, a remnant must be able to survive such a cataclysm. It must be a judgment in history not one which ends history. For the Postmillennialist, the 2046AD Eschaton must result in diminishing wickedness and empowering righteousness.
Newton believed in the possibility of advancement, but it depended upon the choices made by humanity. His laws of physics reflect that point of view:
An object in motion remains in motion. . . unless acted upon by an outside force.
In Moral Government or Providential Government, what would be that “outside force”?
As he quotes Daniel, which has been cited several times in this series:
[After which] the judgment is to sit, and they shall take away his dominion, [not at once, but by degrees,] to consume, and to destroy it unto the end. And the kingdom and dominion, and the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven shall, [by degrees], be given unto the people of the saints of the most High, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him.
– Daniel 8:26-27 (Newton’s commentary in brackets)
In Newton’s physics we do not see the Law of Entropy. That came later from a different scientific persuasion. In Newton’s physics, it is possible for the universe to be eternal and to act as a self-perpetuating machine. Rather than the Big Bang, it coincides better with an Oscillating View of the Universe. The cosmos, through the laws of motion and attraction, continually destroys and then rejuvenates itself.
Likewise in Newton’s theology for the moral realm, it is possible to overcome Original Sin because of the work of Christ. The work of Christ is “the outside” force. But is it a “cause” or an “influence”?
(to be continued)
