PREFACE
I began writing my economic commentary on Genesis in the spring of 1973. I wrote one chapter per month for the Chalcedon Report, beginning in May, 1973. I accelerated the process in August of 1977: ten hours a week, 50 weeks a year. Even so, it took me until 1982 to publish The Dominion Covenant: Genesis. I immediately began working on Exodus. That project occupied eight years and three volumes of commentary, plus four books that served as appendixes to the third volume.(1) Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion took three years (1982- 85); The Sinai Strategy: The Economics of the Ten Commandments took a year (1985-86); and Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus took four years (1986-90). Leviticus: An Economic Commentary, a short version (about 800 pages) of Boundaries and Dominion, took almost five years (1990-94). Yet when I began Leviticus, I had thought that I might do Leviticus and Numbers in one volume.
It took me about six months to write the first draft of this book. I began in January of 1995. I completed the first draft in late June. It took another six months to revise, typeset, proofread, and correct it. By that time, I had finished Chapter 29 of my commentary on Deuteronomy, which went through Deuteronomy 12. The Deuteronomy manuscript was already longer than the entire commentary on Numbers. I had not expected much trouble in writing Sanctions and Dominion, but I had not expected it to be as easy as it turned out to be, not counting the appendix, which was a challenge. I do not expect any future volume in this series to be equally easy.
My next assignment will be far more difficult to achieve. Deuteronomy repeats many of the laws of Exodus and Leviticus. I shall have to write it while looking over my shoulder at what I have already written. New readers who have not read my commentary on Leviticus will expect full discussions; readers who have read it will want mainly new material. It is difficult to please everyone and still keep a book short enough to be read by anyone. It will not be a short book.
The Five-Point Covenant Model Deuteronomy completes book five of the Pentateuch, which in turn follows the five-point structure of the biblical covenant model.(2) When I began writing this economic commentary on the Bible, I was unaware of this structure's all-pervasive importance for understanding the Pentateuch. I had read Meredith G. Kline's Treaty of the Great King (1963) years earlier, but I had forgotten its thesis regarding the precise number of points in the covenant. I did not recognize its implications for this project until late 1985, when Ray Sutton first presented his version of the model, based on the earlier research by Kline. Sutton's version was more precise - exactly five points, not five or six - and it was more explicitly judicial. Most important, he brought the covenant model into the New Testament era, unlike Kline, who had relegated it to the Mosaic economy only. Kline's goal was to seal off the Mosaic law from the New Testament era. Sutton's goal was to demonstrate the continuity of the covenant's structure in both testaments.
First, I saw that the Ten Commandments are structured in terms of two parallel sets of five points each, priestly (1-5) and kingly (6-10).(3) This verifies the Protestant version of the numbering of the Decalogue, in contrast to the Roman Catholic and Lutheran(4) arrangement. It also lays to rest Calvin's peculiar 4-6 structuring of what he regarded as the two tables of the law: 1-4 (piety) and 5-10 (justice).(5) The traditional 5-5 structuring had been suggested as early as Josephus' first-century history of the Jews.(6) That structuring is correct, although Josephus' thesis that the two tablets had five commandments written on each of them probably is not.(7) Second, I realized that the Pentateuch itself is structured in terms of the same five points: Genesis (God's transcendence/presence), Exodus (God's authority and Israel's deliverance), Leviticus (God's law), Numbers (God's historical sanctions), and Deuteronomy (Israel's inheritance). On these points, I have gone into greater detail in the General Introduction in the second edition of The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (1987) and in the Preface to Leviticus: An Economic Commentary. There is no need to repeat myself here.
The Book of Numbers extends the Bible's covenant model through a consideration of Israel's post-exodus, pre-conquest wilderness history. As the fourth book in the Pentateuch, its overarching theme is sanctions: point four of the biblical covenant model.(8) God brought negative sanctions on the exodus generation because that generation had refused to bring negative sanctions against Canaan immediately after the return of the spies. When the next generation brought negative sanctions against cities on the wilderness side of the Jordan River, its members proved that they were covenantally ready to escape from the wilderness. The historical events of the wilderness era were, above all, a manifestation of God's corporate covenantal sanctions in history: negative against Israel.
New Heavens and New Earth: Prophesied Sanctions We come now to the passage of the Bible that amillennialists resist commenting on, the passage that categorically and forever testifies against amillennialism. The crucial issue is sanctions: specifically, the historical sanction of extremely long life. Isaiah wrote of God's work in his day:
For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind. But be ye glad and rejoice for ever in that which I create: for, behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy. And I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and joy in my people: and the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her, nor the voice of crying. There shall be no more thence an infant of days, nor an old man that hath not filled his days: for the child shall die an hundred years old; but the sinner being an hundred years old shall be accursed (Isa. 65:17-20).
Consider these highly specific words: "There shall be no more thence an infant of days, nor an old man that hath not filled his days: for the child shall die an hundred years old; but the sinner being an hundred years old shall be accursed." These words are clear; they are also prophetically binding. They tell us that in this sin-cursed world, where death still reigns, the reign of death will someday be challenged by a revolutionary increase of life expectancy. This has not happened yet; it must be in the future. This prophecy cannot possibly apply to the post-resurrection world of eternity, for death will still exist, the text says. This passage is literal and eschatological. The promised blessings are both literal and future. These blessings are the kinds of blessings that postmillennialists and premillennialists(9) expect during a literal, future era of millennial blessings. These historical blessings cannot be allegorized away without compromising the text, yet allegorizing is the only exegetical option for an amillennialist. This passage unquestionably destroys the case for amillennialism. No wonder amillennial Bible commentators and theologians grow hyperbolic and allegorical on those exceedingly rare occasions when they deign to offer comments on this, their position's exegetical Achilles' heel.(10) The positive sanction of long life is just too positive for their would-be future realm of Satanic persecution of the church. Sinners who die at age one hundred will be accounted as children: early death. Covenant-keepers will live much longer than this. But these demographic conditions reverse the prophesied amillennial future, where evil always increases in strength and receives external blessings, while righteousness is increasingly confined to the persecuted ghettos of life.
The historical sanctions of God during the final phase of the New Heaven and New Earth, as described by Isaiah, conform to the postmillennial system: righteousness is rewarded with greater wealth and power in the long run, while evil becomes increasingly impotent. Such a view of the future, we are assured by amillennialists, is heretical. It is obvious who ought to be the chief heretic in the canon of amillennialism: the prophet Isaiah.(11)
My main point here is that God's historical sanctions are indissolubly connected to the process of corporate inheritance and disinheritance in history. That is, eschatology and historical sanctions are indissoluble covenantally. To discuss either without reference to the other is to commit a major exegetical error.
Covenantal Sanctions and the Protestant Reformation The issue of oath-bound sanctions served as the great dividing issue theologically in the Western church from the Protestant Reformation until the late nineteenth century, when eschatology replaced sanctions as the primary dividing issue within the Protestant community.(12) Martin Luther broke with Rome over the practical question of the sale of indulgences. He asked: Does the Papacy possess the authority to annul God's eternal sanctions in exchange for cash? The underlying theological issue here was salvation from hell's negative sanctions: By faith or by works? But the theoretical issue of the judicial basis of salvation came as a spin-off of the practical question of the sale of indulgences. It was Tetzel's sales program that led to Luther's 95 theses.
There were two other covenantally related issues that came to the forefront in the Reformation, neither of which has ever been settled: vows and sacraments. The Roman Church accused Luther and his allies of being vow-breakers, which indeed they were. This accusation was reasserted eloquently as recently as 1993 by E. Michael Jones in his study of the sexual debauchery of modern art, Degenerate Moderns.(13) He traces the degeneracy of modern art to the sexual debauchery of the artists. Then, without warning in the final chapter, and without offering any historical evidence for subsequent connections, he identifies the origin of modern sexual debauchery in Western art and culture as Luther's undermining of priestly and monastic vows. Jones argues that Luther wanted sex; the priests and nuns wanted sex; they broke their vows to get sex; and that led to Picasso. This line of reasoning may seem a bit tenuous to Protestants, but so ingrained is the centrality of the vow of celibacy in the thinking of traditionalist Roman Catholics that the emptying of Northern European nunneries and monasteries, 1520 to 1540, constitutes for some of them the crucial turning point in Western civilization. Everything evil in Western male-female relations stems from that event. They believe that it did more than merely undermine the church's ministry; it destroyed Christendom. The monstrous evil that Renaissance humanism's Papacy had become by 1517 is somehow beside the point; better the Borgias than Luther, we are still implicitly (though never explicitly) assured. The Borgias bribed people, poisoned people, and led totally debauched lives, but Luther broke his vow of celibacy. The latter act is seen as the essence of the great rebellion, not the former.
The other issue, the sacraments, was also the issue of covenantal sanctions. Luther asked: How many sacraments are there? Who has the authority to admit laymen to these sacraments? Who has the right to excommunicate whom? All of these sacramental issues were tied to the overriding issue of oath-bound ecclesiastical sanctions. A series of excommunications and counter-excommunications began in Northern Europe in the 1520's; they led to civil wars in the next century.
Because the West was Christian, the entire social order was oath-bound in 1517: church, State, and family. Only the Jews lived outside rule of law established by covenantal Trinitarian oaths, and they lived in separate ghettos with their own legal order. In the West, these ghettos were literally sealed off at night. In Poland, Jews lived in enclaves in the cities owned by the nobility, exempt from many gentile urban economic laws. This ghetto system benefitted the rabbis, for it transferred civil power to them over other Jews.(14) But Jews were the great exception; everyone else was under Trinitarian covenantal oaths. Thus, the Reformation's schism over the legitimacy of existing oaths led in the sixteenth century to dynastic persecutions, burnings at the stake, and wars in Northern Europe, followed by a series of civil wars in the seventeenth century. The devastating Thirty Years War in Germany (1618-48), the English-Scottish war (1638-41), the English Civil War (1642- 49), Cromwell's Lord Protectorship (1652-58), the restoration of Charles II in 1660, were all struggles over the content of the civil oath.
The theoretical reconciliation of this covenantal issue in civil affairs after 1700 marks the triumph of Enlightenment political pluralism over a pietistic Protestantism. Newtonian natural law theory replaced the Bible and Scholastic natural law theory as the new basis of social ethics and civil law. Protestants abandoned civil institutions to what they believed was a legitimate common-ground moralism. Today, almost all Protestant theologians defend this dualism between revealed religion and civil authority. According to Enlightenment political theory, civil authority is not governed by Trinitarian oaths; it is governed by common-ground confessions of loyalty to a religiously neutral State. This confession of faith is accepted by Protestant theology, though with increasing doubts regarding the underlying myth of neutrality. As the myth of neutrality fades, so does the theoretical foundation of modern political pluralism.
The Renunciation of God's Historical Sanctions To maintain the legitimacy of civil oaths without Trinitarian content, pluralism's Christian defenders have had to renounce the concept of predictable supernatural sanctions in history, i.e., sanctions invoked by corporate covenantal oath. This denial of the presence in the New Testament era of God's predictable covenantal sanctions has left Protestantism without any means of defending the ideal of Christendom. Lutheranism was always dualistic, but Calvinism was originally cultural-civilizational. Unofficially after 1700, and formally after 1787, American Calvinism adopted Lutheranism's dualistic view of society.(15)
Without the concept of covenantal sanctions in history, original Calvinism's comprehensive world-and-life view has been truncated to encompass little or nothing outside church and family. Attempts to revive Calvinism's once confident worldview, but on a pluralistic basis, most notably Abraham Kuyper's attempt in the late nineteenth century Netherlands, and more recently Francis Schaeffer's in the United States, have all failed, and for the same three reasons. First, without an appeal to a uniquely biblical law-order that encompasses politics, there is no way to distinguish Christendom from common-ethics Enlightenment humanism. Second, without the threat of God's predictable direct sanctions in history - sanctions lawfully invoked by covenantal oath - Christians cannot provide a biblically grounded defense of the right of the State to enforce the Bible-mandated sanctions attached to biblical law. The State imposes its sanctions as God's minister (Rom. 13:4). If God does not bring sanctions in history in terms of His covenant law, neither should the State. Civil law then becomes humanistic law. Third, without a predictable historical separation of cultural inheritance and disinheritance in terms of God's law and biblical sanctions, the meek cannot inherit the earth. Covenant-breakers will. Modern pluralistic Calvinism denies all three.(16) Thus, it cannot suggest a uniquely Calvinist or even vaguely Trinitarian social theory. It merely baptizes the reigning humanist pluralist worldview and then rushes to embrace some crackpot liberal economic reform scheme that the liberals abandoned as hopelessly out of date ten years earlier.
The Lutherans have always been ethical dualists. Luther defended a theory of two completely separate legal orders, one for Christians and the other for the inherently non-Christian State.(17) For Luther, there was no possibility of Christendom.(18) The Anabaptists have also remained consistent: they renounced the ideal of Christendom and its mandated Trinitarian civil oaths in the aftermath of the failed Münster communist rebellion in 1535. In both views, Christian passive resistance to State tyranny is all that is allowed by God. This quietism was not Northern American Presbyterianism's view until after the de-frocking of J. Gresham Machen in 1936 and his death six months later, when Presbyterianism finally succumbed to eschatologies analogous to Lutheranism's amillennialism(19) and Anabaptism's premillennialism.(20) Quietism was not Southern Presbyterianism's view until after the Civil War, when the denomination went pietistic-fundamentalist on the few social issues it formally discussed: gambling, liquor, and prostitution, but not tobacco.(21) American Presbyterianism in the twentieth century has abandoned its Scottish roots, thereby becoming either Lutheran-amillennial or pietist-premillennial in its social outlook. Pessimillennialism, when coupled with the ethical dualism of modern political pluralism, has transformed Calvinism into something barely distinguishable from its old Protestant rivals: Lutheranism and Anabaptism.
Sanctions and Eschatology: Calvin vs. Kline John Calvin believed that God enforces His law in history through the imposition of predictable sanctions. This was basic to his worldview. Without this faith in historical sanctions, Calvinism would have become another version of Lutheran dualism or Anabaptist quietism. Calvin's comments on the fifth commandment's promise of long life and blessings to those who obey their parents is indicative of his outlook. He knew, as David knew (Ps. 73), that bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people. But this does not negate the law of God and its attached sanctions, Calvin insisted. There are times "where God works variously and unequally," Calvin said, but this does not make His promises void. There are always compensating rewards in heaven. More important for our understanding of his outlook, however, is what he adds: "Truly experience in all ages has shown that God has not in vain promised long life to all who have faithfully discharged the duties of true piety towards their parents. Still, from the principle already stated, it is to be understood that this Commandment extends further than the words imply; and this we infer from the following sound argument, viz., that otherwise God's Law would be imperfect, and would not instruct us in the perfect rule of a just and holy life."(22) In other words, the sanctions of the fifth commandment are still in force. God's visible sanctions in history in general are not random; they reflect His commitment to defend and extend His law in history.
Calvin's comments on the fifth commandment were put into final form by the author in 1563, the year before his death, and therefore represent the culmination of his thinking. A century later, in the aftermath of the Restoration of Charles II, his spiritual heirs began to abandon this outlook. They began to lose faith in the covenantal predictability of God's sanctions in history, especially positive sanctions for covenant-keepers.(23) In our day, Meredith Kline has devoted his academic career to persuading Calvinists to abandon Calvin on this point. If Calvin was correct here, then Kline's denial of the continuing New Covenant authority of the Mosaic law-covenant(24) would represent the abandonment of Calvinism in the name of Lutheranism, which I contend is exactly what Kline's theology represents.(25)
Both European Calvinist traditions - Dutch and Scottish - produced their formative documents in an era in which civil sanctions were assumed mandatory in the protection of church doctrine and liturgy. Two centuries later, Anglo-American Calvinism officially renounced the ideal of Christendom in the revision of the Westminster Confession of 1787-88. It adopted the Enlightenment's ideal of political pluralism. The Synod was timed to match the Constitutional Convention of May, 1787. The two meetings overlapped briefly in Philadelphia; the Synod was ending on a Monday as the Convention was beginning.(26) Meanwhile, Continental Calvinism had almost no influence outside of Holland after 1700. After 1800, right-wing Enlightenment social theory was substituted by the theologians for the older theocratic ideal. Calvinist social theory after 1800 has been indistinguishable from conservative humanism's social theory. It has been some variant of Whig political theory.
Kline has offered a dualistic theology in the name of Calvin. Kline's theology rests openly on his denial of the presence of humanly predictable covenantal sanctions in New Testament times. According to Kline, ethical cause and effect in history are, humanly speaking, essentially random. In this, he has challenged Calvin at the very core of Calvin's ethical theory. He writes: "And meanwhile it [the common grace order] must run its course within the uncertainties of the mutually conditioning principles of common grace and common curse, prosperity and adversity being experienced in a manner largely unpredictable because of the inscrutable sovereignty of the divine will that dispenses them in mysterious ways."(27) Calvin, in stark contrast, dismissed such a view of historical causation as pagan to the core. Yes, he said, following David, good things sometimes happen to bad people and bad things to good people, but this is merely Satanic deception. "When such is the state of matters, where shall we find the person who is not sometimes tempted and importuned by the unholy suggestion, that the affairs of the world roll on at random, and as we say, are governed by chance?"(28) With respect to his theory of visible cause and effect in history, Kline succumbed to the temptation.
The theological contrast between Kline and Calvin could not be sharper. In the name of Calvin, Kline has abandoned Calvinism and has substituted an ethical dualism consistent with Lutheranism, Anabaptism, and, for that matter, Enlightenment humanism. His theory boils down to this: in this world, God does not defend or extend His law by means of humanly predictable corporate sanctions. On this point, covenant-breakers are in full agreement with Kline. (So, from what I can see, are most of his colleagues at Westminster Seminary.)(29)
The Christian Ghetto: Living Under Humanism's Sanctions Couple Kline's view of God's unpredictable corporate sanctions in history with the amillennialism of sixteenth-century Calvinism, and the result is ghetto Christianity: the mentality of a defensive community of besieged and culturally doomed Christians - "cannon fodder for Christ." Its unofficial slogan is: "Of the ghetto, by the ghetto, for the ghetto!" With respect to Christian civilization, these ghetto theologians deeply believe, "Once lost, always lost." Christianity must remain a strictly defensive operation culturally. Although Christians created Western civilization, once the humanists conquered it in the eighteenth century, this supposedly set in historical concrete humanism's position as the reigning covenant-breaking social order. Any attempt to re-conquer culture for Christ is heretical, we are assured.
It is true that sixteenth-century Calvinists were hostile to the idea that the gospel would eventually convert most of mankind. On this point, they adhered strictly to the dominant tradition of Roman Catholic eschatology. Calvin himself was ambivalent on the issue; there were elements of what would later become postmillennialism in his thinking.(30) The others were outright hostile. (So were the Lutherans.) But Calvinists also believed that Protestant Christians, although a permanent minority group worldwide, had the right and moral obligation to defend their local majority positions in sections of Northern Europe by means of the sword. They were all theocrats in the traditional meaning of the word. They believed in the imposition of civil sanctions in the name of Jesus Christ and His earthly kingdom.
Not so today. Their spiritual heirs, as Enlightenment pluralists, have abandoned sixteenth-century Calvinism's theocratic ideal, but not its amillennialism. Today, Christians are in the minority everywhere. So it must stay forever, announce the theologians of the Protestant ghetto. So it was always intended to be. Writes Protestant Reformed Church theologian-editor, David J. Engelsma: "The ungodly always dominate. The world's rulers always condemn the cause of the true church. The wicked always oppress the saints. The only hope of the church in the world, and their full deliverance, is the Second Coming of Christ and the final judgment. This is Reformed doctrine."(31) On the contrary, this is merely ghetto theology's doctrine.
The sixteenth-century Reformers believed no such thing regarding the perpetual subordination of Christians to covenant-breakers, which was why Calvin consented to the execution of Servetus. Christians, the Calvinist Reformers universally believed, are not to accept as final any temporary triumph of their enemies in the social order. This is why the Calvinist Reformers all invoked the sword as a means of preserving the hegemony of Protestant Christianity in the West. Every Calvinist theologian agreed on this, right down to the days of Oliver Cromwell. Nor did Calvin teach that Protestant rule in all parts of Northern Europe was necessarily doomed eschatologically. Yet his spiritual heirs have substituted the political doctrines of the Enlightenment's common-ground humanism for Calvin's theocratic worldview. They defend cultural surrender and ghetto living as Calvinism in action, i.e., inaction. They have interpreted Calvin's doubts concerning a future, universal, worldwide rule of Christianity in every society as if Calvin had in some way affirmed the universal, worldwide rule of covenant-breakers over covenant-keepers in every society. Let me put it as clearly as I can: modern Calvinists have adopted Servetus' view of the political order, and they have done so in the name of Calvin. This ought to be regarded as the greatest irony in the history of applied Calvinism. Meanwhile, Calvinist defenders of the permanent cultural ghetto are ready, figuratively speaking, to burn at the academic stake any postmillennial Calvinist who calls attention to this remarkable irony.
Permit me to invoke a familiar phrase: it is never a question of civil sanctions vs. no civil sanctions. It is always a question of whose civil sanctions. It is a question of who imposes sanctions against which public evils. It is a question of whose laws define the public evils for which civil sanctions are legitimately imposed. In short, there is no neutrality.
Second, let me restate the obvious: the history of man is a war between covenant-keepers and covenant-breakers. Marx was wrong: history is not the history of the class struggle. It is the history of the covenantal struggle. Thus, there are two possible choices for building a civilization: Christendom or anti-Christendom. We now get to the famous bottom line: "He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad" (Matt. 12:30). There are Christians who want to limit this two-fold distinction to individual souls, families, and churches. They categorically deny that this division applies to the civil covenant. They do so because they are opposed to the ideal of Christian civilization. Officially, they affirm the existence of a freedom-enhancing, creedally neutral civil law. Unofficially, they either prefer to live under anti-Christian civil laws rather than biblical law, or else they seek a peace treaty with humanism because they are convinced that the only alternative to this is the open persecution of the church and the nearly total destruction of all traces of Christian culture. They believe that their unofficial peace treaty with covenant-breakers can gain Christians limited zones of neutral freedom under "mild" anti-Christian civil sanctions. They prefer life in a Christian cultural and emotional ghetto to the comprehensive responsibilities associated with the Great Commission.(32) To put it in historical terms, their theory of civil government borders on the Amish view. In this sense, Protestant political theory has become Anabaptist, beginning with Roger Williams and continuing in Westminster Seminary's faculty.(33) It relies on some combination of natural law, natural revelation, natural rights theory, and common grace to protect Christians from tyranny.
The issue here is sanctions. Anti-Christendom Christians believe that anti-Christians will not impose harsh civil sanctions on Christians if Christians agree publicly not to impose any civil sanctions on anti-Christians. They have adopted as a New Testament theological doctrine Sam Rayburn's political dictum: "You've got to go along to get along."(34) More to the point, they have adopted the strategy of pre-emptive surrender. They think they can settle for Finlandization: a degree of independence from a powerful neighbor. They forget that Finland achieved Finlandization in 1940 only by fighting Stalin's forces and inflicting so much havoc on his troops that it paid Stalin to settle with them. The Finns did not start out with a policy of Finlandization; otherwise, they would have wound up like Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania.
But it is even worse than this. Christian defenders of neutral politics, neutral civil law, and the pre-emptive surrender of Christians, as Christians, in the political order do not believe that Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Khomeini, and Saddam Hussein are representative of consistent covenant-breaking in operation. They think loveable old Ben Franklin is.
D. J. Engelsma vs. the Mosaic Sanctions As I argue in this book and will argue in greater detail in my commentary on Deuteronomy, the issue of covenantal sanctions cannot be separated theologically from the issue of eschatology. Positive and negative sanctions in eternity - heaven vs. hell, the New Heavens and New Earth vs. the lake of fire - are reflected in history: kingdom of God vs. kingdom of Satan. What divides most conservative Christian expositors today is their assessment of which kingdom visibly reflects God's positive corporate sanctions in history: God's or Satan's. The vast majority of those who call themselves Christians today believe that the answer is clearly "Satan's." God's positive corporate sanctions in history are showered on covenant-breakers, we are told. God's negative corporate sanctions in history are progressively imposed on the church, we are also told. Only one view of eschatology denies this with respect to the New Covenant church age: postmillennialism. This view is dismissed as heretical by premillennialists and amillennialists.
Consider the inflamatory rhetoric of amillennialist Engelsma. He dismisses "the carnal kingdom of postmillennialism" as "injurious, if not disastrous." Postmillennialism raises "practical nightmares." He invokes a code word of the pietist-Anabaptist tradition: "worldly." He goes on: "Reformed men and churches make strange, forbidden, wicked alliances in order, by hook or by crook, to build the earthly kingdom of Christ."(35) Christian Reconstruction introduces the "fundamental heresy of Judaizing" by calling for "a vast array of Old Testament laws. . . ."(36) As for J. Marcellus Kik's book, An Eschatology of Victory (1971), it is heretical, as is Christian Reconstructionism. "By heresy, I mean not only a serious departure from the teaching of the Scriptures but a grievous corruption of the gospel. The error is that the spiritual kingdom revealed and realized by the gospel is changed into a carnal kingdom, and the spiritual triumph of the exalted Christ in history is changed into an earthly triumph."(37) This is very strong judicial language. Is he correct?
Here I must offer the reader an explanation. I devote the remainder of this Preface to answering Rev. Engelsma. Yet he is not a well-known critic of Christian Reconstruction. He is a leader in a small Dutch-American denomination, the Protestant Reformed Church.(38) Then why single him out? First, because he keeps singling me out in his denominational magazine, calling me one of America's most dangerous heretics. But this accusation does not mean too much. To identify me as a heretic requires only that you get at the tail end of a long line. Hal Lindsey, Dave Hunt, and Constance Cumbey (the Hidden Dangers of the Raindow lady) are up at the front; Rev. Engelsma is a comparative late-comer with a very limited readership.
Second is the fact that Rev. Engelsma and his colleague Rev. Hanko(39) are among the very few remaining Dutch-American Calvinist defenders of traditional amillennialism who are willing to go into print on the topic. I have previously referred to their eschatology (and to premillennialism) as ghetto eschatology.(40) Rev. Engelsma admits that there are not many defenders of the Dutch amillennial tradition: "DeMar may well be right when he says that the number of Reformed and Presbyterian amillennialists `is steadily declining.' The reason, in part, is the great apostasy now fulfilling the apostle's prophecy in II Thessalonians 2:3. This falling away is due, in part, to the failure of Presbyterian and Reformed churches, ministers, theologians, and editors of religious periodicals" - he is a minister, theologian, and editor of a religious periodical - "vigorously to defend amillennialism and equally vigorously to expose and condemn postmillennialism."(41) He and Rev. Hanko believe that the church is now in the end times, a belief which they share with most dispensational premillennialists.
In recent years, a growing number of Calvinistic amillennialists have preferred to identify themselves as "optimistic amillennialists." I think this repositioning has had something to do with the Reconstructionists' success in identifying amillennialism as a philosophy of self-conscious historical retreat and psychological paralysis: a permanent remnant psychology.(42) No one likes to be tarred and feathered with this kind of imagery, even if it happens to fit. The amillennialist, like the premillennialist, seeks a cultural stalemate today, since he sees the only eschatological alternative as persecution for the church.(43) For an amillennialist or a premillennialist, a cultural stalemate would constitute a major victory, however temporary, for the church. In earlier versions of amillennialism, its defenders were perfectly content to accept cultural defeat and persecution, in order to assure the imminent return of Jesus Christ in final judgment. "The worse things get, the better we feel: our deliverance draweth nigh!" No one so far has set forth an exegetical case for optimistic amillennialism, i.e., an eschatology of permanently stalemated forces, good vs. evil. But so few theologians today are ready to defend with real conviction and enthusiasm the original amillennial pessimism, that Rev. Engelsma and Rev. Hanko have staked out a kind of operational monopoly: the last really enthusiastic defenders of the older Dutch amillennial tradition. I think they correctly perceive that they face declining public interest in their message of inevitable defeat and persecution for God's church: no victory and no secret rapture. This is not what most people would call an inspiring message.
As we shall see, one thing that bothers Rev. Engelsma is the inescapable reality of the Old Testament's mandated civil sanctions against adultery and homosexuality. The issue is sanctions. He argues that there is supposed to be no trace of the Old Testament's legal order in New Testament era civil law. "The New Testament reality of the nation of Israel, the real kingdom of God in the world, does not legislate and execute the civil laws of the Old Testament. It has no use for the civil laws of the shadow-nation."(44) This means one of two things: 1) the real New Testament kingdom of God has no civil aspect, and hence does not legislate, or 2) the real New Testament kingdom does have a civil aspect, but some other source of civil law has been substituted by God. What other source, he refuses to say.
Reconstructionists ask: "Where should Christians seek accurate definitions of law and crime?" Engelsma prudently remains silent on this point, except to say where we should not search: the Old Testament. He and Rev. Hanko have remained silent on this matter for the last decade and a half in their intermittent attacks on Christian Reconstruction. In this respect, they share a great deal with all of Reconstructionism's critics. Reconstructionists have offered a comprehensive ethical system in the name of Christ; meanwhile, our critics resort to rhetoric. They yell, "Heretics!" This is not a legitimate substitute for detailed biblical exegesis: criticism based on biblical texts. This is why I have devoted almost a quarter of a century to writing detailed commentaries on the economics of the Pentateuch. Our critics have yet to respond with an equally detailed series of commentaries on any aspect of the Pentateuch. As time goes on, the disparity between our commentaries and our critics' rhetoric will become more pronounced.
Kingdom Sanctions
Notice that Rev. Engelsma speaks of "the real kingdom of God in the world." He does not say exactly what this phrase means. I need to make two additional observations. First, if he is defining this "real kingdom" strictly and solely as the institutional church, he has abandoned a fundamental tenet of the Protestant Reformation, which denied that the institutional church constitutes the whole of the kingdom of God in history. The New Testament kingdom encompasses the institutional church, but it is far more. On this issue, I appeal to Geerhardus Vos, a respected theologian in the Dutch Reformed tradition, who also held a faculty position for over four decades at Princeton Theological Seminary. He wrote of the kingdom of God: "There is a sphere of science, a sphere of art, a sphere of the family and the state, a sphere of commerce and industry. Whenever one of these spheres comes under the controlling influence of the principle of the divine supremacy and glory, and this outwardly reveals itself, there we can truly say that the kingdom of God has become manifest. . . . On the one hand, his [Christ's] doctrine of the kingdom was founded on such a profound and broad conviction of the absolute supremacy of God in all things, that he could not but look upon every normal and legitimate province of human life as intended to form part of God's kingdom. On the other hand, it was not his intention that this result should be reached by making human life in all its spheres subject to the visible church."(45) The institutional church is narrower than God's kingdom. This has always been the Reconstructionists' view of the kingdom.(46) It is quite conventional in Reformed circles, contrary to Rev. Engelsma's suggestion.
Second, if Rev. Engelsma is not defining the kingdom as the institutional church alone, then he needs to offer reasons why the Mosaic civil laws governing adultery and homosexuality are no longer valid. It is not enough for him merely to say that they are not valid; he must show us why. He refuses to do this, however. He immediately moves from the question of civil law to the church, calling on the church to exercise only the power of excommunication. This is an illegitimate line of argument. The two systems of covenantal sanctions are judicially separate: State vs. church. Any discussion of church sanctions as if these in some way constitute the whole of the kingdom's earthly sanctions is in error. If the kingdom is more than the institutional church, which it is, then a covenant theologian must discuss civil sanctions in terms of covenantal law. But Rev. Engelsma, whose theology becomes pietistic at this point, prefers to discuss only church sanctions. He wants his readers to imagine that only church sanctions possess the legitimate designation of kingdom sanctions in history. He writes: "For the church is a spiritual realm. She does not, e.g., put adulterers and homosexuals to death. Where there is public, impenitent practice of these sins, the church exercises discipline, which is a spiritual key of the kingdom of heaven. Her purpose is the repentance of the sinner, so that she may again receive him into her fellowship."(47)
This logically irrelevant comment deflects the reader's attention from the crucial judicial issue: the function of civil sanctions in a Christian commonwealth.(48) No author in the Reconstructionist camp has suggested or implied that the institutional church has the authority to impose civil sanctions.(49) The issue of criminal sanctions is a State matter. It is here that Christians, as Christians, are required by God to suggest explicitly biblical definitions of crime. But Rev. Engelsma has already ruled out any appeal to the Mosaic law as a possible standard for definitions of crime. Why? He offers no exegetical or hermeneutical reasons; he apparently just does not like the Mosaic law.
Notice: if we substitute the words "sexual molestation of children" or "murder" or any other crime for "adultery" and "homosexuality," Rev. Engelsma's subtle shift from a discussion of Mosaic civil sanctions (supposedly annulled in our era) to ecclesiastical excommunication (always open to removal upon repentance) would strip Christians of the biblical authority to call for biblically defined State sanctions against crime. The twin issues here are definition and sanctions. Definitions of criminal behavior and the appropriate legal sanctions are found in the Mosaic law. But Rev. Engelsma rejects the Mosaic law. His theological position leads, step by step, to the necessary acceptance by Christians of humanist definitions of crime. His open and defiant rejection of the Mosaic law and its civil sanctions in principle delivers Christians into the tender mercies of covenant-breaking man, which is exactly where Rev. Engelsma says Calvinism teaches that we must be until Christ comes again. For those of us who think that we are not morally obligated or eschatologically condemned to such a state of affairs, Rev. Engelsma has a description: "heretics."
What is the kingdom of God? In this book and throughout my writings, I offer this simple definition: the civilization of God, i.e., Christendom. God's kingdom comprises redeemed hearts and redeemed institutions. It is neither exclusively spiritual nor exclusively material-social, neither exclusively eternal nor exclusively temporal. The kingdom of God is parallelled by the kingdom of Satan. What are the former's boundaries? Wherever sin presently operates, there Christians should seek to extend the boundaries of the kingdom of God. Its definitive boundaries are the whole creation. "And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth" (Matt. 28:18). Its operational boundaries are being extended through time, but not in a straight line. Territory is gained; then it gets surrendered. The question is: Can the whole world be subdued to God's glory? Not perfectly, but progressively, the postmillennialist says. Not in history, the amillennialist says. Only after Jesus comes with His angels to rule the earth in person, the premillennialist says.
The pessimillennialist, whether premillennial or amillennial, resists my definition of the kingdom, for it extends long-abandoned and long-denied areas of responsibility to Christians. It announces the need for comprehensive evangelism as part of God's mandated program of comprehensive redemption.(50) Pessimillennialists seek to escape these added kingdom responsibilities. It is all that the pietistic theologian can do to maintain biblical relevance inside the narrow confines of the Christian ghetto. Defending the Bible's relevance in the frightening world outside this ghetto is more than he chooses to bear.
Orwellian Newspeak
Rev. Engelsma's eschatology denies the transforming power of the gospel in history. It does not present Christianity a world-transforming, evangelizing, spiritual leaven (Matt. 13:33). It implies that the presence of the Holy Spirit will not transform our world. He sees Satan's earthly kingdom as possessing the only comprehensive, world-changing program in history. His implicitly humanistic social theory and his defeatist eschatology justify life in a defensive Christian ghetto.
For Rev. Engelsma and theologians who share his views, the doctrine of Christ's bodily ascension in history to the right hand of God remains an irrelevant doctrine for social theory. In fact, these men deny the very possibility of Christian social theory, precisely because of their ghetto eschatology. They spend their careers re-writing the plain meaning of the Great Commission: the discipling of all nations.(51) The Great Commission cannot mean this, Rev. Engelsma's theology implicitly insists; therefore, it must mean gathering the elect out of these nations, not placing them over these nations through successful evangelism. The promised victory of Christ is re-defined as Satan's permanent defeat of the Great Commission in history.
Rev. Engelsma understands that Christians resist being labeled pessimists and retreatists, especially when they really are pessimists and retreatists. He therefore adopts the language of postmillennial optimism to describe the amillennial defeat of Christ's Great Commission in history. In this sense, he is a faithful practitioner of what George Orwell called "newspeak" in his novel, 1984. "Freedom is tyranny. Peace is war." For Rev. Engelsma, defeat is victory. Christ supposedly has predestined that His church must fail in fulfilling the terms of the Great Commission. This failure must be regarded by Christians as a great victory, he believes, since the church has and will continue to participate in its cultural suicide mission.
Amillennialism believes that the gospel is now, will be, and always has been "successful" (we prefer to say, "victorious") on earth. Its triumph on earth is its accomplishment of the purposes of the risen Christ with the gospel. These purposes are the gathering of the elect out of all nations and thus the saving of the nations in them; the preservation of the elect in faith and holiness; the empowering of the elect believers and their children to live obedient lives to the Lord Christ in all spheres of earthly life; the building of the church; and the hardening of the reprobate. This victory is worldwide.(52)
So, he says, Christ empowers His people "to live obedient lives to the Lord Christ in all spheres of earthly life." I ask: "What constitutes Christian obedience to Christ in the realm of politics?" Political reform? He answers emphatically, no; rather, we must retreat more deeply into our Christian ghetto, self-consciously and openly abandoning the entire social and political world to the devil. This is God's plan for the ages, he says. "But Satan does have `complete control over the nations of the world.' Of course, he is not the almighty sovereign. The triune God is sovereign. But Satan controls the nations of the world as to their spiritual condition."(53) This is not merely a temporary condition that Christians must work to reverse. On the contrary, we must learn to live with it. "Until the personal return of Christ, the nations under the government of the kings of the earth make war against Him as He is present in His church by His Word."(54) The old phrase that Ben Franklin recommended as America's national slogan - "Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God!" - has been in effect reworked by Rev. Engelsma: "Resistance to tyrants is disobedience to God!" Our goal is to be let alone by the humanists in our little ghettos. Otherwise, our task is to serve as martyrs. There is no legitimate hope in Christian social transformation. We are little more than sheep for the slaughter. He calls this theology "victorious." Indeed, it is . . . for Satan.
Conclusion The seventeenth century brought the beginnings of postmillennial optimism to Protestantism, and accompanying this postmillennialism, for the first time in man's history, came the ideal of long-term economic growth, compounded. This economic growth ideal eventually transformed England; it was in England that the Industrial Revolution began in the late eighteenth century. What was first believed to be possible in the seventeenth century began to take place a century later: long-term growth without permanent reversal.
Anglo-Scottish-American Presbyterianism was postmillennial right down to the late nineteenth century. Only with the spread of liberalism and pietism in the Northern Church and pietism in the Southern Church after 1900 did conservative American Presbyterianism move into premillennialism and amillennialism, when Scofield in the South and Westminster Seminary's mostly Dutch faculty in the North after 1936 replaced the postmillennial tradition of the Hodges, Warfield, Thornwell, Dabney, and Machen. But all of them, on the question of sanctions, agreed with the Anabaptists: God does not bring predictable corporate sanctions in history in terms of societies' adherence to or defiance of His Bible-revealed law. They were right-wing Enlightenment Whig humanists on the question of civil oaths.(55)
To maintain such a Whig worldview, you must abandon the Book of Numbers. The Book of Numbers is the Pentateuch's book of sanctions. The refusal of the Israelites of the exodus generation to impose negative military sanctions against Canaan brought God's negative sanctions against them: death in the wilderness. This indicates that sanctions are an inescapable concept. It is never a question of sanctions vs. no sanctions. It is always a question of whose sanctions. As Lenin so graphically put it, "Who, whom?" There is no escape from this question in eternity; there is also no escape from it in history, as the exodus generation learned to their great discomfort.
Footnotes:
1. Dominion and Common Grace (1987), Is the World Running Down? (1988), Political Polytheism (1989), Millennialism and Social Theory (1990).
2. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992).
3. Preface, Gary North, The Sinai Strategy: Economics and the Ten Commandments (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1986), pp. xiv-xxi.
4. Conservative Lutherans do not like to be referred to as "Protestants," which they equate with the Swiss Calvinistic Reformers. Their version of the Decalogue reinforces this preference. Their view of justification by faith does not.
5. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses Arranged in the Form of a Harmony, 4 vols. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, [1563] 1979), III, p. 6.
6. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, III:v:5.
7. Ibid., III:v:8. I accept Kline's thesis: there were two complete sets of ten commandments each that were placed inside the Ark of the Covenant as testimonies: one was God's receipt; the other was Israel's. Meredith G. Kline, The Structure of Biblical Authority (rev. ed.; Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1975), Pt. II, ch. 1.
8. Milgrom refers to "the difficulties of finding the book's inner cohesion." Jacob Milgrom, The JPS Torah Commentary: Numbers (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1990), p. xiii. This inner cohesion becomes obvious when it is seen as book four in the Pentateuch, with the Pentateuch structured by the covenant model.
9. What destroys the premillennial system is Matthew 13, the chapter on historical continuity between the first advent of Christ and His second advent.
10. Amillennialist Archibald Hughes, in a book titled A New Heaven and a New Earth (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1958), refuses to comment directly on this passage, despite the fact that the phrase "New Heaven and New Earth" first appears here. He mentions the passage only in passing, along with other verses, saying that it refers to eternal life, despite the fact that it discusses long life, not eternal life (pp. 138-39). There is no other comment anywhere in his book on this, the key problem passage in the Bible for amillennialists. This sort of evasive scholarship reveals a deep-seated weakness of the amillennial position.
11. For a detailed study of the eschatological and social implications of Isaiah 65:17-20, see Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), ch. 5.
12. In the early church, the initial divisive issue was sovereignty: the doctrine of God. This was settled by the great Trinitarian creeds of the early church councils. It was the only issue that ever was settled. Then the debate moved to authority: church vs. State. The Eastern Church placed the State at the top of the hierarchy in history. The Western Church proclaimed the equal ultimacy of church and State under God. That issue came to the forefront in the West in 1076: the Papal Revolution. The next dividing issue in the West began immediately: the doctrine of law. The Scholastics attempted to fuse Roman law and canon law into one theoretical system. They failed; the two legal orders separated: rational law (State) vs. spiritual law (church). The modern world has inherited this ethical dualism.
13. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.
14. Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years (London: Pluto, 1994), pp. 54, 60-63.
15. The Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America ("Covenanters") long resisted this, but how much of the older view is shared today in this tiny denomination is questionable. Much depends on the theological commitment of the faculty of its denominational college, Geneva College.
16. Gary Scott Smith, The Seeds of Secularization: Calvinism, Culture, and Pluralism in America, 1870-1915 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Christian University Press, 1985). This publishing house is a subsidiary of William B. Eerdmans.
17. Martin Luther, "Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed" (1523), in Luther's Works (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1962), vol. XLV.
18. Charles Trinkaus, "The Religious Foundations of Luther's Social Views," in John H. Mundy, et al., Essays in Medieval Life (Cheshire, Connecticut: Biblo & Tannen, 1955), pp. 71-87.
19. Westminster Seminary was dominated by Dutch theologians after 1936.
20. Carl McIntire's Faith Seminary after 1936 and the Bible Presbyterian Church after 1938.
21. The Virginia and Carolina economies were closely tied to tobacco.
22. Calvin, Harmonies, III, p. 11.
23. The turning point in New England was marked by the publication in 1662 of Michael Wigglesworth's two poems, The Day of Doom and God's Controversie With New England. In England, the imposition of the Act of Uniformity (1662) and the expulsion of some two thousand Calvinist pastors from their pulpits were equally devastating to older Calvinism's faith in the future and in God's positive sanctions in history.
24. Kline, Structure of Biblical Authority, Pt. 2, ch. 3: "The Intrusion and the Decalogue."
25. Kline's former student and full-time disciple Michael Horton is far more open regarding this quest for a Lutheran-Calvinist reconciliation. The judicial basis of such a reconciliation is Calvinism's acceptance of Lutheranism's ethical dualism, which Horton seems to accept. In a letter to Christian News (Nov. 13, 1995), a conservative Lutheran publication, he wrote of his organization, CURE, that "we are building a cooperative effort between the Reformed and Lutheran Christians in an effort to restore a Reformation witness." Horton left the Reformed Episcopal Church and joined the Christian Reformed Church in 1995.
26. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), pp. 543-48.
27. Meredith G. Kline, "Comments on an Old-New Error," Westminster Theological Journal, XLI (Fall 1978), p. 184.
28. John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, [1557] 1979), III, p. 122.
29. Gary North, Westminster's Confession: The Abandonment of Van Til's Legacy (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1991).
30. North, Millennialism and Social Theory, Appendix D: "Calvin's Millennial Confession." Cf. Gary North, "The Economic Thought of Luther and Calvin," Journal of Christian Reconstruction, II (Summer 1975), pp. 104-106.
31. Editorial, "A Defense of (Reformed) Amillennialism. 3. Apostasy and Persecution," The Standard Bearer (May 1, 1995), p. 365.
32. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., The Greatness of the Great Commission: The Christian Enterprise in a Fallen World (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).
33. North, Westminster's Confession. See also North, "`I've Been Framed!' A Study in Academic Positioning" (Dec. 1995), published by the ICE.
34. Rayburn was Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives longer than anyone in history, 17 years, 1940 to 1961, excepting only 1948-49 and 1953-55, when the Republicans were in power. He was America's second most powerful politician after the President. He was a House member from 1912 to his death in 1961, also a record.
35. David J. Engelsma, "Jewish Dreams," The Standard Bearer (Jan. 15, 1995), pp. 173-74.
36. Ibid., p. 174.
37. Ibid. (March 15, 1995), p. 295.
38. It was founded in 1923 in reaction to the Christian Reformed Church's position on common grace, namely, that God shows some degree of favor and love to all men. The PRC has denied the very existence of God's common grace, thereby abandoning Calvin and the entire history of Reformed theology. Their theologians cannot easily explain I Timothy 4:10: "For therefore we both labour and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe." What did Paul mean, specially, if special grace does not contrast with common grace? Salvation in this general context of God's universal salvation means healing, not eternal life. See Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), p. 57.
39. For an intellectually devastating refutation of Rev. Hanko's writings on eschatology, see Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., He Shall Have Dominion: A Postmillennial Eschatology (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), Appendix B.
40. Gary North, "Ghetto Eschatologies," Biblical Economics Today, XIV (April/May 1992).
41. Engelsma, "Another Letter and Response on `Jewish Dreams'," The Standard Bearer (March 15, 1995), p. 296.
42. R. J. Rushdoony, Van Til (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1960), p. 13.
43. Gary North, Backward, Christian Soldiers? An Action Manual for Christian Reconstruction (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1984), ch. 11: "The Stalemate Mentality."
44. Engelsma, "Jewish Dreams," op. cit., pp. 174-75.
45. Geerhardus Vos, The Teachings of Jesus Concerning The Kingdom and the Church (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1958), p. 88.
46. See R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), pp. 69-70, for a discussion of this point which relies on Vos.
47. Engelsma, "Jewish Dreams," op. cit., p. 175.
48. Kenneth L. Gentry, "Civil Sanctions in the New Testament," in Theonomy: An Informed Response, edited by Gary North (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1991), ch. 6.
49. Gentry, "Church Sanctions in the Epistle to the Hebrews," ibid., ch. 7.
50. Gary North, Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988), Appendix C: "Comprehensive Redemption: A Theology for Social Action."
51. Gentry, The Greatness of the Great Commission.
52. Engelsma, "An Open Letter to Gary North (Part One)," The Standard Bearer (March 1, 1996), p. 246.
53. Engelsma, "A Defense of (Reformed) Amillennialism. 3. Apostasy and Persecution," ibid. (May 1, 1995), p. 343.
54. Engelsma, "A Defense of (Reformed) Amillennialism. 2. Revelation 20," ibid. (April 15, 1995), p. 366. April 15 is tax-filing day in the United States: appropriate for Dr. Engelsma's tirade against all Christian political reform.
55. Gary North, Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1996).
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