23 BLASPHEMY AND CIVIL RIGHTS Bring forth him that hath cursed without the camp; and let all that heard him lay their hands upon his head, and let all the congregation stone him. And thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel, saying, Whosoever curseth his God shall bear his sin. And he that blasphemeth the name of the LORD, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as well the stranger, as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the name of the LORD, shall be put to death. And he that killeth any man shall surely be put to death. And he that killeth a beast shall make it good; beast for beast. And if a man cause a blemish in his neighbour; as he hath done, so shall it be done to him; Breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth: as he hath caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be done to him again. And he that killeth a beast, he shall restore it: and he that killeth a man, he shall be put to death. Ye shall have one manner of law, as well for the stranger, as for one of your own country: for I am the LORD your God (Lev. 24:14-22).
Basic to the concept of every social order is the sanctity of the god that is believed to defend it. The source of a society's law is the god of that society.(1) For example, no political order exists that does not have a concept of treason. As Rushdoony says, "there can be no tolerance in a law-system for another religion. Toleration is a device used to introduce a new law-system as a prelude to a new intolerance. . . . Every law-system must maintain its existence by hostility to every other law-system and to alien religious foundations, or else it commits suicide."(2)
Historical Context The Israelites faced a problem: What should be done with a blasphemer who was half Israelite and half Egyptian? "And the son of an Israelitish woman, whose father was an Egyptian, went out among the children of Israel: and this son of the Israelitish woman and a man of Israel strove together in the camp; And the Israelitish woman's son blasphemed the name of the LORD, and cursed. And they brought him unto Moses: (and his mother's name was Shelomith, the daughter of Dibri, of the tribe of Dan:) And they put him in ward, that the mind of the LORD might be shewed them" (Lev. 24:10-12). God's answer would establish a precedent: a new case law.
The historical context of his blasphemy was a fight. The blasphemer had uttered his curse against God in the midst of a physical struggle with an Israelite. This context points to the nature of blasphemy: a verbal attack on God by means of an attack on a representative of God. The blasphemer had verbally assaulted God in the presence of a covenanted follower of God. In effect, the act had publicly challenged God and His representatives to do something about it. The blasphemer had announced by his curses that neither God nor God's people possess lawful authority in history. He broke the national covenantal oath, not merely by renouncing his citizenship through renouncing faith in God, but by uttering a curse against God. He had profaned God's name. This was an active assault, which was not tolerated in Israel. It was a capital crime.
Penalty God's required civil sanction against blasphemy is clear from His answer to Moses' inquiry: "Bring forth him that hath cursed without [outside] the camp; and let all that heard him lay their hands upon his head, and let all the congregation stone him" (Lev. 10:14) This verbal assault had been an act of rebellion, of treason. It had been a public challenge to the legitimacy of the social order. The legitimacy of the covenanted social order had to be maintained by the State. The proper civil sanction, God insisted, was public stoning: the corporate execution of the blasphemer.
No society in the West enforces this statute in modern times, or even thinks about it. No society in the West requires witnesses to participate in the public stoning of those who have committed a capital crime. This biblically mandated sanction has never been taken seriously by church or State in New Covenant times. Indeed, even to suggest that stoning is a legitimate form of execution, let alone required by God, is to risk bringing down the negative sanction of public ridicule on the head of the person who suggests this, and ridicule by Trinitarian theologians at that.(3) The modern world, including the modern Christian world, takes offense against the very idea of negative sanctions imposed by God, whether Mosaic, historical, or eternal.(4) Nevertheless, the fundamental issue of blasphemy is the binding character of the respective sanctions: verbal sanctions against God, civil sanctions against blasphemers, and divine sanctions against societies that ignore these sanctions.
The problem is two-fold for the biblical expositor who rejects the idea that the stoning of blasphemers is still required by God: 1) to explain exegetically why blasphemy is no longer a capital crime; 2) to explain exegetically why stoning is no longer God's mandated means of execution. I challenge the reader: find any nineteenth-century or twentieth-century commentary on this passage that attempts to do either of these tasks. You will not find one. Instead, the commentators implicitly assume that no one in his right mind would imagine that either of these God-revealed requirements is still judicially binding on society; therefore, no comments are necessary. This is why God has placed Christians in cultural bondage: not because they may have misapplied His Bible-revealed law on occasion but because they have not taken His law seriously enough even to bother to explain it.(5)
What is -- not merely was -- the judicial issue of blasphemy? It is treason against God. What is the penalty? Restitution. When a direct attack against God takes place in public, the restitution payment is the forfeiture of one's life. This is why blasphemy is a capital crime. But few, if any, Christian commentators are willing to discuss blasphemy in terms of judicial categories.
Treason Against God In the humanist West, religious differences are assumed to be irrelevant to the proper functioning of a society's legal order. Religious pluralism is assumed to be the ethically proper form of the civil covenant.(6) In such a judicial setting, the Mosaic law prohibiting blasphemy is not taken seriously. It has been annulled somehow, although Christian critics of the blasphemy law rarely specify exactly why or on what New Testament basis. Rarely do they discuss the nature of the crime or its impact on the social order. They need to pay attention to the Jewish legal historian and U.S. Constitution specialist, Leonard W. Levy, who has correctly identified the nature of the crime of blasphemy: treason against God.(7) Such treason is no longer regarded as a crime. As Levy writes: "In the twentieth century, scorning God, even reviling Him, T. S. Eliot reflected, is merely a breach of good taste, not of deep-seated faith."(8) A violation of etiquette is not considered valid legal grounds for calling in the civil magistrate.
Blasphemy is not a monopoly of monotheistic religions, Levy argues. "Blasphemy is taboo where organized religion exists, and monotheistic systems hold no monopoly on the concept of blasphemy. Any pagan society, whether as civilized as ancient Egypt or as primitive as idol-worshipping savages on Papua, can imagine superior beings or spirits that influence man's destiny; every religious society will punish the rejection or mockery of its gods. . . . Punishing the blasphemer may serve one of several social purposes other than setting an example to warn others. Punishment propitiates the offended deities by avenging their honor, thereby averting divine wrath. . . ."(9)
Levy correctly points out that there are very few accounts in the Old Testament of the crime of blasphemy and its punishment. Idolatry was continual (at least prior to the exile), but blasphemy played little role.(10) He is also correct that with the advent of the Christian political order, blasphemy was defined broadly, encompassing "not only verbal abuse or denial of Christianity but even the expression of a difference of opinion about it."(11) It was equated with heresy. This was an illegitimate application of the biblical blasphemy law, for blasphemy is a verbal assault on God's ethical character, not an intellectual proposition about His nature. It is a public curse, not an intellectual error. To charge someone with blasphemy when he is only theologically incorrect is a form of slander.(12) This case law's context in Leviticus 24 is that of physical crimes: murder, physical assault, and killing a neighbor's animal.
The biblical justification of the blasphemy law is the threat of God's negative sanctions against any covenanted society that refuses to uphold His integrity. God brings His curses against covenanted societies that rebel against Him. The capital sanction is mandated by God's law because there should be no doubt in anyone's mind that whenever a covenanted society allows men to curse God publicly, God will surely reciprocate. But when men lose faith in a God who brings predictable negative corporate sanctions in history, they will lose interest in enforcing the law against blasphemy. After all, they conclude, if God is unwilling to uphold the integrity of His law, let alone His name, in history, then why should His embarrassed, progressively outnumbered, and politically vulnerable followers uphold His law or His name? They much prefer to renounce the suggestion that societies should be explicitly covenanted to God. Pluralism seems so much safer than the Great Commission: "And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you" (Matt. 28:18-19).(13)
Blasphemy and Negative Sanctions Whenever and wherever the doctrine of a personal God or gods is regarded as irrelevant to the legal order, blasphemy is assumed to offer no threat to the integrity or survival of the social order. It steadily loses its status as a crime. Virtually no one in a position of leadership in the West today believes that there is a personal God who brings predictable negative corporate sanctions in history against those societies that tolerate blasphemy. This includes those who identify themselves as Christians. Muslims do not agree with the Christians on this point. Muslims take God's corporate sanctions seriously; they take blasphemy seriously.(14)
Blasphemy is cursing: a verbal attack on God, comparable to assault. Blasphemy calls down on God some sort of implicit negative sanction for having misrepresented Himself. Blasphemy is the opposite of the positive sanction: "Bless God." The classic example of blasphemy in the Bible is the statement by Job's wife: "Curse God, and die" (Job 2:9b). The two events are associated: cursing God and death. It is almost universally assumed today that God's name needs no civil protection. God is not regarded as a person in the legal order. He therefore is entitled to no judicial protection. This means that men are not to be threatened by the State for cursing God, i.e., publicly saying that the God of the Bible is a liar, or a cheat, or some other kind of reprobate being, and therefore deserving of contempt.
Treason against God is considered judicially irrelevant. Treason against the State is regarded as serious, but concern over even this form of treason has faded in recent decades. Treasonous acts that would have led to execution in 1950 today result in life imprisonment with no possibility of parole, which means parole will be possible a decade later. There is a judicial reason for this: wars fought by the United States after World War II have not been formally declared wars. The U.S. Congress has not formally declared war, which Constitutionally is the only legal basis of war. With no formally declared enemy, it has been difficult to prosecute treason.(15) With the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, it is likely that another round of reduced sanctions for treason will result: the West's primary enemy has disappeared. But treason is an inescapable concept. It is correlative to the concept of final sovereignty. Where there is an acknowledged final sovereignty, there will always be laws against treason. It is only during temporary periods in which final sovereignty is not widely agreed upon that we see the relaxation of the treason laws.
Restitution and Rights The text of this case law continues:
And he that killeth a beast shall make it good; beast for beast. And if a man cause a blemish in his neighbour; as he hath done, so shall it be done to him; Breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth: as he hath caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be done to him again. And he that killeth a beast, he shall restore it: and he that killeth a man, he shall be put to death. Ye shall have one manner of law, as well for the stranger, as for one of your own country: for I am the LORD your God (Lev. 24:18-22).
By presenting a discussion of the civil laws governing restitution within the context of the blasphemy laws, the Book of Leviticus makes it plain that the fundamental legal issue here is restitution: the imposition of appropriate sanctions. This restitution case law governs murder: "And he that killeth any man shall surely be put to death" (v. 17). The death penalty is God's required means of enforcing earthly restitution for certain crimes, irrespective of the opinion of any victim.(16) The convicted criminal is to be transferred from the civil court to God's heavenly court. The means of this transfer is execution.
Strangers
The ultimate foundation of biblical law is the sovereignty of God. The original sin of mankind was to transgress the word of God by physically transgressing the "No Trespassing" injunction regarding the forbidden fruit. The appropriate sanction was death, both physical and spiritual. Yet the crime visibly was trespassing: the transgression of a barrier. Then why death? Why not some sort of restitution? This is the wrong way to phrase the question. Death is restitution to God. Eternal death is God's ultimate sanction, and it is applied to every infraction. "For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all" (James 2:10). The negative sanction is death. "For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord" (Rom. 6:23). It was not simply that Adam was not to transgress God's property; he was not to defy God by ignoring His threatened negative sanction: death. Satan promised positive sanctions to man: to become as God, knowing good and evil. God threatened a negative sanction: death. Which voice of authority would man obey? His outward actions would determine whose covenant he would affirm: God's or Satan's.
Why did this case law apply to strangers in the land? Because the whole of the Mosaic civil law applied to strangers. "One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you" (Ex. 12:49). Restitution was owed to the victimized stranger in Israel as much as to the victimized Israelite. The civil law was not to discriminate in the application of sanctions. This civil protection of the stranger rested on a presupposition: the civil protection of God's name. A society that refuses to protect the integrity of God's name is not going to protect the stranger very long. The theocentric nature of God's law is inescapable. What men do "unto the least of these," they do unto God (Matt. 25:40, 45). This is the biblical doctrine of representation. Similarly, and even more surely, what men seek to do to God, they will eventually do to the least member of the commonwealth. Christians in modern times generally believe the first version of the equation -- "from the least of these to God" -- but not the second version: "from God to the least of these." They are not particularly concerned about the annulment of civil laws against blasphemy. They are much more concerned about civil rights of minorities. The problem is, there can be no long-term extension of civil rights to minorities without an equal extension of civil rights to God. God is much more concerned about His own civil rights than about man's presumed civil rights. God is more concerned about the legal immunity of His name from public desecration than He is about a man's supposed autonomy from both God and other men in desecrating God's name. This perspective is the antithesis of the pluralistic religion of our day, but it is true nevertheless. God is theocentric in His perspective.
Rights
What are legal rights? They are boundaries of individual thought and action that may not be lawfully transgressed or interfered with apart from the permission of the individual who has been granted a legitimate sphere of authority. A civil right is a boundary protected by the threat of civil sanctions. Covenantally, any society that does not honor God's boundaries will find itself under God's negative corporate sanctions. The most appropriate negative sanctions are boundary violations: pestilence, foreign invaders, wicked rulers, and well-meaning bureaucrats. "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help" are among the most ominous words of modern life. They announce the initial stage of servitude.
Civil rights in a society must begin with the blasphemy law. If God's name and reputation are not protected by law, then no man's name and reputation will be protected for very long. A man's name and reputation are more important than his physical property. Shakespeare's lines in Othello are true:
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
If God is regarded as either unwilling or incapable of bringing negative sanctions against those who violate His name, then why should His judicial representatives bother to press God's case in a civil court? They do not, and no century proves this more conclusively than the twentieth: Christian theologians have abandoned hope or belief in God's predictable historical sanctions,(17) and they have also abandoned any belief in the legitimacy of the blasphemy law, let alone its biblically mandated sanction. No one in his right mind wants to bring a covenant lawsuit against a rebellious society if he also firmly believes that God will not prosecute that lawsuit in history. But if God's judicial representatives are unwilling to press His case, then covenant-breakers should not be expected to.
This raises the issue of the prophetic office. The Old Covenant prophet brought a covenant lawsuit against individuals and societies. He declared God's law; then he announced God's sanctions. "Thou art the man," Nathan told David; then he announced God's sanctions. These sanctions would be visible: "I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun" (II Sam. 12:12b). God honored Nathan's word. This was verification of Nathan's office as a true prophet. With the final Mosaic sanctions against Israel in A.D. 70, this office ceased. Today, God's people act in a prophetic fashion, but they are not prophets. They declare God's law and His covenantal sanctions in history, but they cannot say precisely which sanctions will be imposed and when. But to deny that God's sanctions are in any way predictable in history in terms of His law is to deny the prophetic function altogether. If this theology were true, the gospel would lose its status as prophetic. Its proclamation would become a matter of personal opinion in history regarding sanctions in eternity. The covenantal link between history and eternity would be broken because the covenantal link between historical and eternal sanctions is broken. To a great extent, this is the gospel of modern evangelicalism. Denying God's law and especially its mandated civil sanctions, and denying also God's predictable corporate sanctions in history, modern evangelicalism has stripped the gospel of its prophetic character.
Thus, a society that has disallowed the Bible's blasphemy law is not in a position to defend itself against the extension of the society of Satan: the triumph, judicially and culturally, of Satan's representatives in history. If God's name is not worth defending through civil law, neither is anyone else's. It should come as no surprise that we have seen the virtual annulment of civil laws in the United States that once protected public figures from libel.(18) It is not enough for a victim to prove that someone has lied about him; he must also prove malice on the part of the liar.(19) This erosion of protection has escalated in the final third of the twentieth century, paralleling the systematic removal of God's name from all public institutions and space in the U.S. We have also seen the rise of gossip as a major political force. This has tarnished the reputations of politically liberal adulterers -- to a man, the public defenders of civil rights and opponents of anachronisms like the blasphemy laws -- far more than it has damaged conservatives.(20)
Blasphemous Art The crime of blasphemy is clearly verbal. This raises the issue of communication. Is the expression of blasphemy confined to verbal or written documents? Or can it be expressed symbolically?
Consider the piece of art known as the "Piss Christ."(21) It is a photograph -- not an actual handicraft -- of a crucifix immersed in urine. It created a sensation, and great opposition from conservatives, when it was displayed at a North Carolina art museum in 1989. The artist was Andres Serrano. The photo was part of a series that included the "Piss Pope" and the "Piss God."(22) It turned out that part of the funding for the art came from the United States government. He had received $15,000 from the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), a tax-funded organization. The NEA received at the time over $170 million a year from the Federal government. When U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, a senator from the state of North Carolina, protested this use of taxpayer money -- not, by the way, the blasphemous character of the art -- he was vilified by the liberal news media.(23) In retaliation, the NEA gave $20,000 to MARS Artspace in Phoenix, Arizona, to help fund an exhibit called "Piss Helms": a photo of Senator Helms in a jar of urine.(24)
Biblically speaking, the Piss Christ photograph is blasphemous; the Piss Helms is not. Both are repugnant. Both are attacks against lawful authority. One is treason against God; the other is a vicious political statement of contempt. That either should be displayed publicly is an outrage. But we must distinguish the two; the first is a capital crime before God, as defined by His word; the second is not. Both, however, are obscene. And both are morally revolutionary.
Revolutionary Art
The NEA had also funded Robert Mapplethorpe, a homosexual photographer who had died of AIDS by the time his sadomasochistic photographs appeared in several "art exhibits." Also included in the "show" was a photograph of a little girl's genitals and another of a man with a bullwhip up his rectum. These photographs appeared at exhibits in Philadelphia and Chicago, but when they were scheduled for Washington, D.C., conservative congressman (and Ph.D. in economics) Richard Armey protested. Armey and a hundred congressmen complained in writing to the NEA. Washington's Corcoran Museum cancelled the show in June of 1989. The NEA had given the gallery $300,000 in 1988.(25) Three months later, the museum issued a public apology, not for having scheduled the exhibit, but for having cancelled it.(26)
A member of the Senate of the state of New York(27) put pressure on the NEA council. He wanted the organization to ratify an anti-obscenity pledge that artists receiving money from the NEA not indulge in obscene art or acts. The NEA defied the public; its advisory body voted overwhelmingly, 17 to 2, to reject any such restriction.(28)
There is an old phrase, "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like." After the story of Federal funding by the NEA hit the news media, a variation appeared in a newspaper cartoon, "The Lockhorns," in which the main character is staring at a framed canvas filled with paint splotches. "I don't know much about art, but somebody is getting away with murder." Thomas Fleming identified the political issue: "Most Americans don't know much about art, but they do know what they don't like, namely blasphemy, pornography, and perversion."(29)
Fleming recognized the revolutionary implications and goals of such art. "Violent revolution and pacifism, tribalism and universalism are celebrated with a passionate pluralism that can embrace everything but loyalty and restraint. It is a misleading picture, because the writers of these manifestos are for the most part quiet little drudges addicted to prescription drugs and nonviolent (i.e., safe) protest."(30) Then why do they get the funding from the State? Because the political regime is itself perverse. "American radicals are, in a literal sense, the loyal opposition, because they support the cultural and moral goals of the regime: social dissolution, decay of community, and the sense of helplessness and anomie that encourages decadency."(31)
Fleming made an important observation: from the era of World War I, a writer or painter has had two paths open to him: "a profitable career as a capitalist artist or a comfortable sinecure as artist-rebel." To become an artist-rebel means "taking on the government as patron; university jobs, major grants, tax-subsidized publications, exhibitions, and lecture tours. All that is required of you is to parrot the lies of the regime: the American family is a sick institution, Western man is racist and sexist, Christianity has poisoned the water and killed off the whales, etc., etc. The solution to each of these crises is more money for more social agencies, more money to fight racism and pollution, and -- do not forget -- more money for `the Arts'. . . ."(32)
It is this decline of the arts and rise of government funding that marks the decadence of a social order that is in self-conscious rebellion to God. Such art is not just pornographic.(33) It is obscene, and as such, it constitutes blasphemy. It is obscene in the sense that the self-professing obscene author Henry Miller defined it. Speaking of his own book, Tropic of Cancer (1934), he proclaimed: "This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants of God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will."(34) It is a public war against God and any remaining traces of Christianity in Western civilization. When the book first appeared, it was legally banned in the United States because of its explicit sexual contents, i.e., its character as pornographic. It was published in 1961, challenged in a civil court in 1962, and declared legal by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1964 (a 5 to 4 decision).(35) By the time of his death in 1980, Miller's books were in print and easily available.
That the blasphemy law is not enforced, or even discussed as a judicial possibility, in such an era as mine is to be expected. Such an era cannot survive for long. It may suffer a revolution, or it may experience regeneration, but it will not survive "as is" for long.(36)
Conclusion What kind of crime is blasphemy? The Bible's discussion of the appropriate sanction against blasphemy appears in a passage that raises the question of restitution: killing animals, injuring men. This indicates that blasphemy is judicially the equivalent of an assault. The resolution of the incident rests on the idea that the State must intervene and impose the ultimate form of restitution: the death penalty. The criminal is thereby delivered into God's heavenly court for final judgment.
Blasphemy is a public attack on the character, integrity, and final authority of the God of the Bible. The attack may call down a formal curse on God. It may describe God in obscene or perverse language or imagery. It constitutes a public assault against a biblically covenanted Christian social order. Treason against God is treason against a biblical covenantal order, for it undermines the legitimacy of the covenantal family, church, and State. But the State in the West today is regarded by political pluralists as neutral theologically. This is why political pluralists have been forced to abandon the enforcement of the crime of blasphemy. The crime of blasphemy is no longer regarded as a crime because the ideal of a biblically covenanted social order is no longer taken seriously. With the political triumph of the humanistic theology of political pluralism, all supernatural gods and laws have been relegated to the realm of adiaphora: issues not fundamental to the true faith, namely, the religion of humanism.
The biblical legal foundation of the concept of civil rights rests on a more fundamental concept: unlawful trespass. What belongs to God cannot lawfully be stolen or misused. What belongs to God's agent, man, also cannot be lawfully stolen or misused. The primary form of ownership is ownership of one's own name. God identified Himself to Moses as "I AM THAT I AM" (Ex. 3:14): the self-defined, self-contained Creator God. The authority to name something is a mark of hierarchical authority. God named Adam; Adam named the animals (Gen. 2:20) and then Eve (Gen. 3:20). The name of God must be defended. So must the name of man. Thus, an attack on a person's good name is a crime, but only because an attack on God's name is a more serious crime. Biblical law is theocentric. A crime is primarily an attack on God; secondarily, an attack on man as God's representative. A public assault on God's name is therefore a capital crime, the archetype of all civil rights laws. If God's rights are not defended by the civil order, then no one's rights are safe. When a man's good name can be publicly tarnished, his purse is not safe either. That the libel laws should have been weakened in this, the century of massive taxation, compulsory wealth redistribution, and political pluralism, should come as no surprise. The present age of legislated envy began with an attack on the authority of God during the French Revolution. Envy has spread to every institution, including even the State. If God's name is not safe from public vilification, then nothing is safe.
Blasphemy is associated with a curse, not with theological error as such. Heresy is not a crime. It is not a direct public assault on the character of God. It is a serious error to equate blasphemy with heresy.
Summary The context of this case of blasphemy was a fight.
The blasphemer had attacked God verbally.
He had uttered a curse against God.
The penalty for blasphemy was stoning.
No society in the West honors this statute.
The biblically mandated sanction -- stoning -- has never been applied in New Testament times.
Modern commentators do not discuss stoning.
The judicial issue of blasphemy is treason against God.
The West assumes today that religious differences should be irrelevant to every legal order: pluralism.
Blasphemy is regarded as bad manners, not treason.
Christians neglect the blasphemy law because the reject the idea of national covenants.
They also reject the idea of God's predictable corporate sanctions in history.
This is not true of Muslims.
Treason against the State in the West has also declined in importance judicially.
The theological context of the blasphemy law is restitution.
The blasphemer is transferred to God's court: execution.
If a society will not protect God's name will not long protect strangers in the land.
What men seek to do to God they will eventually do to the weakest in the land.
God's rights must be protected if minority rights are to be protected.
Rights are legal boundaries: immunities.
A civil right is a boundary against civil sanctions.
A society must honor God's judicial and moral boundaries if it is to avoid God's negative corporate sanctions.
These negative corporate sanctions often involve boundary violations: invasion, pestilence.
If God refuses to prosecute in history, then His disciples will be fearful of presenting a covenant lawsuit against society.
The society of Satan will then extend its influence.
God's name is not publicly protected today; neither are the names of public figures: the demise of libel laws.
Can art be treasonous? In some cases, yes.
Art has become revolutionary.
The State is funding it.
The State has become decadent: in rebellion against God.
This cannot go on indefinitely.
Blasphemy is a form of assault.
Laws against unlawful trespass should be enforced, beginning with God's name.
Footnotes:
1. R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), p. 4.
2. Ibid., pp. 5-6.
3. In their attempt to establish a dispensational case against capital punishment for any crime except murder, H. Wayne House and Thomas D. Ice refer to my five-point defense of public stoning as God's specified means of execution. They seem to believe (perhaps correctly) that this will seal their case in modern fundamentalist circles against the theonomists' defense of the Mosaic penal sanctions. House and Ice, Dominion Theology: Blessing or Curse? (Portland, Oregon: Multnomah Press, 1988), p. 73.
4. At a meeting in May, 1989, a majority of a group of 385 neo-evangelical theologians of the National Association of Evangelicals voted against the doctrine of eternal punishment. They proclaimed instead the Seventh-Day Adventist and Jehovah's Witness doctrine of "conditionalism" or soul-sleep. See World (June 3, 1989).
5. A good example of this attitude of near-contempt for the text has been provided by Westminster Theological Seminary professor Tremper Longman III. He cited dispensational authors House and Ice with respect to my assertion that stoning is still biblically mandatory, which I argued in The Sinai Strategy (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1986), pp. 122-25. Put more strongly, Longman seems not to have bothered to look up the passage in The Sinai Strategy. He was content to join a pair of antinomian dispensationalists in their professed astonishment that anyone would consider the possibility that God's Mosaic Covenant civil sanctions are still be in force. Longman confined his remarks to a one-sentence footnote, indicating his lack of concern for the entire topic. Theonomy: A Reformed Critique, edited by William S. Barker and W. Robert Godfrey (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Academie, 1990), p. 47n. Yet consider the title of his essay: "God's Law and Mosaic Punishments Today." He refused even to discuss this explicit punishment in an essay devoted to Mosaic punishments. This is what passes for conservative academic Christian scholarship in the twentieth century: a self-conscious refusal to interact with the text of the Bible. Twentieth-century Christian scholarship reveals a heavy dependence on warmed-over, undergraduate-level, liberal humanist sociology. For my response to Longman, see Gary North, Westminster's Confession: The Abandonment of Van Til's Legacy (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1991), pp. 199-202.
6. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), ch. 5.
7. Leonard W. Levy, Treason Against God: A History of the Offense of Blasphemy (New York: Schocken Books, 1981). Schocken Books is a Jewish publishing house.
8. Ibid., p. 3. He cites Eliot's After Strange Gods (1934), pp. 55-57.
9. Ibid., p. 6.
10. Ibid., p. 331.
11. Idem.
12. Rushdoony is categorically wrong to invoke the charge of blasphemy against all amillennialists and premillennialists: "Amillennialism and premillennialism are in retreat from the world and blasphemously surrender it to the devil." R. J. Rushdoony, "Postmillennialism versus Impotent Religion," Journal of Christian Reconstruction, III (Winter 1976-77), p. 126. On dispensationalists: "I have had some of these escapists tell me that if the Lord will not rapture them out of the `tribulation,' they see no point in being a Christian! This is not faith: it is blasphemy." Chalcedon Report (June 17, 1968); reprinted in Rushdoony, The Roots of Reconstruction (Vallecito, California: Ross House, 1991), p. 640. More generally: "If, for example, we refuse to work, and then pray to God for food for our family, we are doubly guilty before God, guilty of improvidence and blasphemy." Chalcedon Report (Jan. 1, 1966); ibid., p. 547.
13. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., The Greatness of the Great Commission: The Christian Enterprise in a Fallen World (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).
14. The liberal ex-Muslim novelist Salmon Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verses (1989), a book that impugned the character of Muhammed. Iran's political leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, immediately issued a death warrant against Rushdie, offering $5 million to anyone who would assassinate Rushdie, despite the fact that Rushdie was an Indian expatriate living in England. Khomeini died a few months later. Rushdie went into hiding, then publicly apologized, and finally reaffirmed his faith in Islam, but the death warrant has not been repealed. The idea that a Muslim leader can legitimately hire assassins to kill a resident of another national jurisdiction indicates how committed radical (i.e., original) Islam is to the ideal of conquest by the sword.
15. The obvious example was the popular actress Jane Fonda during the Vietnam "war." Legally, she did not commit treason. Conservatives ridiculed her as "Hanoi Jane," but they could not say that she was treasonous, despite her public endorsement of Communism. Her career soared during and after the conflict. Similarly, American pilots captured by the North Vietnamese were not entitled to Geneva Convention protection because the United States had not declared war against North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese treated them as spies who have no rights. They were tortured without legal appeal. See Jeremiah A. Denton, Jr., When Hell Was in Session (Clover, South Carolina: Riverhills Plantation, 1976).
16. Murder (Ex. 21:12), bestiality (Ex. 22:19), passing children through Molech's fire (Lev. 18:21; 20:2), homosexual acts (Lev. 20:13), wizardry (Lev. 20:27), and blasphemy (Lev. 24:16). Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 318-20. Sabbath-breaking was a capital crime under the Mosaic Covenant (Ex. 31:14-15), but not under the New Covenant: Gary North, The Sinai Strategy: Economics and the Ten Commandments (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1986), ch. 4, Appendix A.
17. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), ch. 7.
18. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964). Cf. The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation, prepared by the Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1972), pp. 1003-7. The case was handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court two years after Engel v. Vitale, in which prayer in public schools was outlawed by the Court. In 1963 came Abington School District v. Schempp, in which Bible reading in public schools was outlawed. Cf. Constitution, pp. 920-22.
19. A very fine movie that examines the crisis produced by the annulment of the libel laws is Absence of Malice (1981).
20. The reputation of President John F. Kennedy (1961-63), literally a daily adulterer, has been tarnished retroactively. In his day, however, the press still covered up for him. No longer. U.S. Senator Gary Hart, the leading candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for President in 1988, went down to defeat when his suspected adultery with Donna Rice became public. A photograph of Miss Rice sitting on his lap on the pier next to the rented boat "Monkey Business" ended his campaign. Miss Rice had the good grace to disappear very quietly into religious service work after the scandal died down.
A quarter century earlier, so had England's Member of Parliament and Secretary of War, John Profumo, whose scandal regarding a prostitute brought down the Conservative government in 1963. It was not that he had committed adultery that destroyed him; it was that he had lied on the floor of Parliament about the aair. Lying publicly to one's colleagues is taken very seriously by Parliament; adultery isn't. If the prostitute had not also been close to a known Russian agent, Profumo probably would have had no problem. He worked nearly anonymously for the next two decades, helping juvenile offenders, for which he was eventually granted national honors by the Queen. What is not remembered is that the conservative journalist who first broke the story in a small-circulation newsletter went to jail for violating the government's secrecy laws by exposing Profumo. English common law is more concerned about protecting the civil government than protecting God's name.
21. In a century or so, should anyone read this section of the commentary, I presume that he will find it difficult to believe. If things have gone beyond what I describe here, there will be little of civilization remaining, so no one will be reading this. What I describe here is grotesque, but readers in the distant future had better understand what was going on in the era in which I began this commentary project. In the late nineteenth century, when such passages as these appeared in classic works such as the Church Fathers or even Calvin, the translators refused to translate the Latin.
22. "The Cultural Politics of Controversial Art," Insight (July 17, 1989).
23. See, for example, John Farrell and Max Benavidez, "Obscenity of Censorship," Dallas Times Herald (Aug. 8, 1989). This liberal newspaper went out of business two years later; it was purchased by the more conservative Dallas Morning News.
24. Letter sent by Donald E. Wildmon of the American Family Association: March 10, 1990.
25. "Cowed Corcoran," Economist (June 24, 1989).
26. "Corcoran Gallery Is to Apologize For Mapplethorpe Cancellation," New York Times (Sept. 19, 1989).
27. A senator in the state senate of New York, not the U.S.
28. "Arts panel opposes anti-obscenity oath," Dallas Morning News (Aug. 4, 1990).
29. Thomas Fleming, "The Art of Revolution," Chronicles (June 1990), p. 14.
30. Ibid., p. 15.
31. Ibid., p. 16.
32. Ibid., p. 17.
33. Gary North, "Pornography, Community, and the Function of Law," Journal of Christian Reconstruction, II (Winter 1975).
34. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (New York: Grove Press, [1934] 1961), p. 2.
35. The case was Grove Press v. Gerstein (1964). Two years later, some members of the Court had forgotten that the Court had approved it. Leon Friedman (ed.), Obscenity: The Complete Oral Arguments Before the Supreme Court of the United States in the Major Obscenity Cases (New York: Chelsea House, 1970), p. 266.
36. For my detailed criticisms of Franky Schaeffer, the son of Francis Schaeffer, regarding his preference for the "art" of Mapplethorpe and Serrano to fund-raising appeals by television evangelists, see my essay, Franky Schaeffer, Please Shut Up, Position Paper on Blasphemy (March 1992), published by the ICE.
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