“So You Wanna Go Back to Egypt . . . You Wanted to Live in the Land of Promise, But now it’s getting so hard.” title and lyrics from Keith Green’s album, circa. 1980
Author’s Note: This series is autobiographical to provide background for the books and articles you will find on this website. When the series is finished, I will provide a summation in a bio-page. Links to previous installments are found at the bottom of the article. –JWS, website creator.
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I read Finney’s Revival Lectures in 1976 (Revell Publishing, 1965), and underlined a statement in its Introduction which has remained a guiding principle throughout my entire life: “A revival is nothing else than a new beginning of obedience to God.”
The challenge throughout all these years has not been to figure out how to start a spiritual revival – that’s the easy part – but rather, to figure out what brings it to an end. Finney answers that question as well, on the next page: grieving the Spirit of God with sin.
When the people of God grieve the Holy Spirit through disobedience, then God withdraws His grace, and society falls into darkness.
This has been my beacon to guide me through the night of doctrinal confusion.
So, then, if disobedience brings spiritual declension, how do we know when we are being disobedient to God?
Answer: Biblical Law
Now, here’s the rub: Does “Biblical Law” include the standards of the Old Testament, or for Christians, is it just the New Testament?
The difference is sanctions. The law hasn’t changed, just the opportunity for repentance and redemption. Civil penalties imposed by the Old Testament should be suspended if the possibility for reform exists, but not the moral law itself. As a “rule for action” it is an eternal principle in God’s kingdom.
That’s why the penitentiary system exists: “penance.” While it has become a corrupt system, it has become so because of political patronage. A better system would be to use lesser penalties in the place of the greater ones. For example, instead of execution for juvenile violence toward parents, or sending him to prison, perhaps the lash would produce better results, if accompanied with Christian counseling.
Finney himself did a cursory review of biblical law in his theological lectures at Oberlin using the Ten Commandments as a template. That was an era in which men were not afraid to impose corporal punishment for insubordination. It was employed in extreme situations at Oberlin among wayward students.
It’s hard to believe that his pro-theonomic position was followed by generations of apostasy among his institutional heirs which has resulted in the most deranged example of “Wokeism” we have today. But the spectacle that is Oberlin College is beyond the scope of this discussion.
Finney’s pro-theonomic lectures, however, were preserved and published only in skeletal form. We do not have much to source his views on biblical casuistry, except for his lectures against slavery.
Fortunately, a more recent exposition has been R. J. Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law (1978), which I discovered in the MST library. How Rushdoony’s works got into the MST library, an avowed Calvinist, I do not know. I have surmised that one of the faculty, probably Michael Cordner, was responsible for that. His son, Matt, was a fellow student (home schooled) with whom Randy and I sometimes collaborated. Matt’s “viable ministries” assignment was to publish a newsletter, “Moral Update,” which attracted far more interest than my tiny “Campus Action” project. He built an impressive mailing list which included the likes of Mrs. Ruth “Billy” Graham, wife of the famed American evangelist.
1978 was also the year that Rev. Jerry Falwell started his “Moral Majority” and Rushdoony published what made him renown among the Christian Right: Law & Liberty. Had MST remained open, Matt had arranged for Rushdoony to be put on the visiting faculty roster for the following year.
Ever after, I teethed myself on works of the “Christian Reconstructionists” because of their commitment to Old Testament casuistry. To top the list was Gregg Bahnsen’s Theonomy in Christian Ethics, which remains to this day an irrefutable defense of Old Testament law. A shortened version of the book is By This Standard, for those who find his massive tome too daunting.
I had discovered that Old Testament laws were not only the guideposts to being on God’s side to obtain his grace, they were actually in their praxis the tools of righteous dominion.
As the years went by, I read other “reconstructionist” authors: Gary North, James Jordan, Ray Sutton – also known for a season as the “Tyler Group,” a mere stone’s throw away from Keith Green’s “Last Days Ministries,” YWAM, and so on. In the 1990s, I would give up on the Tyler Group, for reasons discussed here.
Gary North was engaged in a decades-long exposition of a verse-by-verse economic commentary of the Bible, but as a prodigious author who wrote like a pamphleteer, he had numerous spin-offs. His book Unconditional Surrender sounded like Finney’s theology to me, suggesting that he was either influenced by Moral Government theologians, or he was trying to bridge the gap between what was called in the 19th Century “Old School” Calvinism and “New School” Calvinism in an active attempt to recruit these “Moral Government” YWAM-affiliated charismatics. He succeeded to a limited degree with the emergence of what was called “dominion theology” among many politically active charismatics during the final years of the 20th Century. Dominion Theology is “Theonomics-lite” in which it was possible to still remain a premillennialist and keep a distance from some of the more “rigorous” demands of biblical law – an expediency for-the-moment kind of alliance to fight secular humanism.
But I would give up on him too, for more complicated reasons which you can find here.
There were pro-theonomists among other religious groups. British Israelites, for example – an advocacy in favor of the belief that the Anglo-Saxon-Celts are the physical descendants of the “lost” Ten Tribes of Israel and that the British monarchy is a continuation of the Throne of David – has always had pro-theonomic scholars. It can be argued that many Puritan scholars were “British Israelites” because it was upon their ideology that Howard Rand’s Digest of the Divine Law came to be. Seventh-Day Adventists and Armstrong’s now defunct Worldwide Church of God were other movements of some interest.
A spin-off of this centuries-long “British/Israel Identity” movement (which dates from the 14th Century) is “American Identity” theology which is the same thing, except minus the British monarchy. They mistakenly saw America as the Fifth Kingdom (the Stone Kingdom) of Daniel’s prophetic visions. I took a long look at their literature, but found it wanting. I had met Sheldon Emry (the founder of America’s Promise ministry) in 1979 at a campground patriotic event in Southern Illinois which had been advertised on Rev. Don Lyon’s radio station – WQFL – during the Liberty Lobby daily noon reports. I went and set up a book table to sell Rushdoony’s books to offset my traveling expenses and slept in my car.
Emry was featuring E. Raymond Capt’s famous film on “The Missing Links Discovered,” a masterful and irrefutable description of the Israelite tribal migrations from Persia (Parthia) to become the “barbarian” tribes which would later dismember the Roman Empire.
I found Emry to be a gracious and judicious thinker (much later, my independent research would reveal him to be a direct descendant of King Arthur), but his anti-Jewish rhetoric made me feel uncomfortable. I was still fresh from a childhood indoctrination of “the Jews are God’s chosen people” to accept the contrary. Only much later, through the help of Capt, was I able to understand that Rabbinic Judaism was doctrinally the old Phariseeism condemned in the New Testament. Racially, it was Edomite, although today, Judaism is so racially diverse that it cannot be classified as an ethnicity.
[Don’t believe what the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) says about these people. The SPLC is about as truthful as the Soviet Pravda during the years of Josef Stalin’s show trials.]
While some “Identity” preachers advanced a racialist component in their ideology, I never abandoned my Evangelical theology that the Gospel is ethnically inclusive – both in terms of salvation and dominion. In fact, to the contrary, I have argued that Dispensational theology, too, is not Evangelical, either. “The Jews are God’s chosen people” doctrine is a racialist ideology which also is heretical and not Evangelical as defined by the historic Church.
As inspirational and promising as these pro-theonomic movements seemed to be, there were stiffening head-winds.
There was the mass incineration of the Branch Davidians, many of them children, in Waco, Texas early 1993. That was a turning point for many Americans who responded by forming various citizen’s militia movements. I never joined a militia, but I knew of people that did.
Because of Waco, we lost our innocence and discovered that politics was not just a gentleman’s disagreement of policy among otherwise patriotic Americans. The same criminal syndicate that brought about the murder of a President, his brother, and a civil rights leader was still in control of federal law enforcement. It became evident that it was in a clandestine war against the American people. It continues to this day, and periodically, almost relentlessly and certainly suspiciously, massacres occur as a pretext for more government control, especially over the ownership of firearms. And from time-to-time, truly breathtaking conflagrations occur as public sacrifices for these modern Moloch worshippers. And I am not speaking hyperbolically. Notwithstanding all his shortcomings, Alex Jones’ firsthand inflitration of the Bohemian Grove has since removed all doubt that this criminal syndicate is really an idolatrous cult.
But in the 1990s, we saw these adversaries as apparitions in the night.
I would become the target of government hostility as I aligned myself with the edges of this emerging militia movement. My farm venture would become tainted as a militia outpost, with government harassment and intimidation. I got mired down in an easement dispute which forbade vehicular access. The local magistrate with dangling earrings would do nothing about it. Contrary to law and human decency, for over a year, I had to hike in and out with my family of small children until finally I sold out and moved on.
My brother-in-law said I was a victim of “hillbilly justice.” It is true that the South has indulged a system of justice for many generations which on its face is unconstitutional in its abuse of judicial process. But that was only the tip of the iceberg. The county sheriff grimly told me to my face that “there is no justice in the courts.”
I already knew from reading Whitehead’s books (The Separation Illusion and The Second American Revolution) that the defeated South experienced firsthand the effects of martial law during the post-Civil War “Reconstruction” era. Because of the occupation of federal troops to enforce Washington’s decrees, the South had to learn ways to survive which compromised its antebellum heritage of freedom and formed a subculture which violates it to this day. Stealing elections is nothing new to the South.
Only now are the rest of us experiencing what martial law rule really is. In my experience with this easement dispute, the State Legislature had set aside the common law rights of “right-of-way” and replaced it with a statutory remedy which required a litigatory process. It was a boon to lawyers as all changes in the law usually are. All easement disputes had to be re-litigated. So, it did not matter if my family had used a roadway to get home for generations. Common law rights were gone.
But other areas of law were affected too. Common law standards of marital union, for example, have been replaced by statutory law. The “divorce industry” has been the result.
In the American system, the common law was replaced by the “positivist” law of the state legislatures as each year they create and extend a legal code to be enforced by the respective bureaucracies. The true test of a conservative is not whether he embraces the 10th Amendment in support of “state’s rights” or the 2nd Amendment in support of an armed citizenry, but whether he believes in the “unenumerated rights retained by the People” as found in the 9th Amendment. These “unenumerated rights” are those which in a Christian society can be demonstrated to come from the Bible as inherently “Creator-given.” As it says in the Declaration of Independence that “among these rights” are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” – three which are enumerated, many that are not. Common law protects those rights and supersedes the pretended sovereignty of the legislatures.
While Whitehead’s books gave me a good introduction, it was John Bouvier’s five-volume Institutes of American Law (circa. 1850) that explained how the common law worked in the early American period. My friend Dennis Zwonitzer introduced me to them, of which I obtained copies and studied them diligently. Everything that Bouvier said has been demonstrated to be true in my various experiences at litigation through the years.
[Note: the editions available on-line are “select” editions and do not contain the full five-volume set. I said “five-volume set”].
Coming now to a true understanding of the reality, I recognized that there were no “freedom” zones in America. As long as state legislatures continue to lay claim to a spurious and idolatrous sovereignty, the American people will continue to remain in the bondage of the same powers against which they had waged war to gain their independence. I felt that Divine judgment would be necessary to break the shackles and I had to find a place where I could get out of the way. As Jesus said, when you see these things come to pass, “flee to the mountains.”
(to be continued)
James Wesley Stivers, 9/3/23
