33
NATURE AS A SANCTIONING AGENT If ye walk in my statutes, and keep my commandments, and do them; Then I will give you rain in due season, and the land shall yield her increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. And your threshing shall reach unto the vintage, and the vintage shall reach unto the sowing time: and ye shall eat your bread to the full, and dwell in your land safely. And I will give peace in the land, and ye shall lie down, and none shall make you afraid: and I will rid evil beasts out of the land, neither shall the sword go through your land (Lev. 26:3-6).
The theocentric message here is that God is the sovereign sustainer of the creation, who personally intervenes into the realm of nature in terms of His covenant. Because His covenant with Israel was judicial, the land was uniquely under His law's sanctions. This law was not purely impersonal-mathematical; it was ethical.
The covenantal blessings of Leviticus 26:3-6 were corporate. Rain in due season was promised by God for all the land within the boundaries of national Israel, not just for the land belonging to covenant-keeping individuals. The individual Israelite would receive these blessings only as a resident of a covenanted nation: inside the national covenant's geographical boundaries. These boundaries were primarily judicial and secondarily geographical. Only within these covenantal boundaries could the promised blessings be successfully invoked in God's name, generation after generation, and only if those living within these boundaries were actively conforming themselves to the ethical boundaries of God's revealed law. Only inside the land of promise -- a covenanted nation -- were there sufficient numbers of covenant-keepers and also publicly law-abiding covenant-breakers to call forth these promised blessings through the generations.(1) These were not cross-boundary laws.
As I shall argue later in this chapter, the covenantally predictable sanctions of rain and sunshine were exclusive to Mosaic Israel's economy. They were land sanctions, which are no longer God's means of imparting predictable blessings and curses. The New Covenant has transferred God's predictable sanctions from climate to society. What a society does in response to the terms of God's revealed law determines God's predictable blessings and cursings. Nature's climatic processes are no longer covenantally predictable, and hence are no longer covenantal sanctions. It is what society does in response to God's revealed law that will determine whether nature's covenantally unpredictable climatic processes become blessings or curses.
Does this mean that none of the Mosaic covenant's system of corporate sanctions applied outside of the boundaries? No, but it does mean that only inside Israel's boundaries was there any legitimate hope that positive blessings could be sustained long term. The basis of God's blessings is always judicial: God's grace. The nations outside the land could become the recipients of God's common grace, but only if they outwardly obeyed the terms of God's revealed law. But apart from special grace, common grace cannot be maintained long term. The covenant-breaking recipients of common grace will eventually revolt against God and His law. The blessings are not sufficient rewards to persuade them to remain outwardly faithful indefinitely. Large numbers of covenant-breakers must be converted to saving faith if they are not to rebel.(2)
The best example of this process of moral backsliding under the Mosaic Covenant economy is Nineveh, capital city of Assyria. The fact that God threatened Nineveh with destruction in 40 days indicates that the Levitical system of negative corporate sanctions was in operation outside the land of Israel. These were not Mosaic seed and land sanctions. These were cross-boundary sanctions. Nineveh repented on a corporate but external basis in the face of Jonah's preaching of imminent negative sanctions. Why do I say external sanctions? Because no one was required to become circumcised in order for God's wrath to be withdrawn. This was common grace, not special (soul-saving) grace. The nation escaped external destruction because their agrant sinning ended. Eventually Assyria revolted against God, invaded Israel, and carried off the residents of the Northern Kingdom. Then Babylon destroyed Assyria.
Common grace cannot be sustained apart from special grace. Covenant-breakers eventually return to their outward rebellion. God then gives them up to their lusts (Rom. 1:18-22). Apart from circumcision, there was no possibility of special grace under the Old Covenant after Abraham.(3) There could be no inheritance of covenantal blessings beyond the third and fourth generation of those who hated God (Ex. 20:5).
Sanctions and Representation The blessings listed here are agricultural and social: bread, wine, and peace. These are positive sanctions.(4) Ten righteous representatives of Sodom would have kept God from bringing total negative sanctions against that city, but only because of Abraham's negotiation with God (Gen. 18:24-32). But what about positive sanctions in Israel? What had to be done in Israel in order to gain bread, wine, and peace? The people as a covenantal unit were told to obey God. The Bible never mentions a specific percentage of the population that must obey God in order for God's positive, visible sanctions to become predictable in history. This is why the absolute predictability of God's sanctions in history is an unobtainable ideal. But absolute anything in history is unobtainable by men, so this should not deter us in our quest to gain His positive sanctions. What the Bible teaches is that the number of active covenant-keepers must be large enough to represent the nation judicially. The society must be marked by widespread obedience to the civil laws set forth by God. Blessings apart from faithfulness are a prelude to negative sanctions on a comparable scale.
Covenantal Representation
God promised covenantal blessings to the residents of the nation of Israel in response to individuals' covenantal obedience. Obedience is always in part individual, for individuals are always held responsible by God for their actions. This responsibility is inescapable in history and at the day of final judgment.(5) Nevertheless, there is no doubt that God's promised historical responses to individual obedience were corporate sanctions. The question is: How many people in Israel had to obey God's law in order for the nation to receive these promised visible blessings? This is the question of covenantal representation.
In the bargaining process between Abraham and God over the fate of Sodom, Abraham persuaded God to drop the minimum-required number of righteous men to only 10 as the condition of avoiding total negative sanctions against the city (Gen. 18:24-32). These threatened corporate sanctions were both negative and total. There is nothing in the Mosaic law to indicate that a remnant of only 10 men would have preserved the nation of Israel from lesser negative sanctions, such as invasion or captivity. God told Elijah that He had kept 7,000 men from bowing the knee to Baal, but God did not on their account promise to spare Israel. On the contrary, He used Elijah as His agent to anoint Hazael the Syrian, who would then bring negative sanctions against Israel. This revelation from God came as a unit:
And the LORD said unto him, Go, return on thy way to the wilderness of Damascus: and when thou comest, anoint Hazael to be king over Syria: And Jehu the son of Nimshi shalt thou anoint to be king over Israel: and Elisha the son of Shaphat of Abel-meholah shalt thou anoint to be prophet in thy room. And it shall come to pass, that him that escapeth the sword of Hazael shall Jehu slay: and him that escapeth from the sword of Jehu shall Elisha slay. Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him (I Ki. 19:15-18).
Abraham's bargaining was based on a theory of covenantal representation. Ten righteous men in Sodom could have served as representatives for the entire city, even though the city's population was perverse. This is an indication of the magnitude of God's grace. But His grace is not without ethical conditions. There did have to be 10 righteous men in Sodom in order for God to display His grace to all the other inhabitants. The 7,000 covenant-keepers of Elijah's day served as covenantal representatives who kept Israel from being totally destroyed, Sodom-like, but they did not protect the nation from lesser negative sanctions. God's grace sometimes temporarily offsets a widespread decline of faith, as it did in the days of Hezekiah (II Ki. 20:1-6), but if there is no widespread repentance during this period of grace, negative corporate sanctions will inevitably come. They are predictable in history.
Who was responsible for gaining these blessings? The text does not identify any single representative. Could a single agent represent the nation as a whole? In some cases, yes. God spared Judah for the sake of Hezekiah's repentance. The crucifixion of Jesus definitively proves the point.(6) By bringing Him under the negative sanction of public execution, Israel's representatives brought the whole nation under God's negative sanction of public execution in A.D. 70.(7) In Israel, covenantal representatives included the high priest, priests in general, Levites, civil rulers, prophets, and heads of households.(8) The people of Israel were to serve the world as a royal priesthood (Ex. 19:6). They represented other nations.(9) The Mosaic law did not single out civil officers as the nation's primary legal representatives. The office of high priest was far more important than the office of king. National Israel could and did exist without a king; it could not exist without a high priest. It is a sign of the modern world's perversity that the civil ruler is regarded as possessing the crucial form of sovereignty.(10) This same error governed pagan men's thinking in the ancient world.(11)
God's promises to a corporate entity do not mandate that there be a representative political agency to serve as His primary economic agent. This means that a central agricultural planning bureau should not be created by the State, nor should such an agency make the decisions about what to plant, where, and when. There must be no civil "Department of Bread and Wine." Neither it nor any another political agency should decide which crops to sell, at what price, and to whom, except during wartime, and then only because the State takes on a priestly function, when its corporate decisions are literally life-and-death representative decisions.(12) Nevertheless, the question remains: If God makes men responsible collectively, as His covenantal promises indicate that He does, then what kind of representative human authority should be established in order to monitor the arena -- the boundaries -- in which the sanctions are applied, both positive and negative?
Stipulations and Representation God's covenantal promises in the Mosaic law were ethical, not magical or technical. They were governed by God's stipulations: the boundaries of legitimate behavior. Were these stipulations exclusively civil? No. Were they predominantly civil? No. The Mosaic laws matched the four covenants, i.e., the four biblically legitimate self-maledictory oaths: individual, familial, ecclesiastical, and civil. The problem in any covenanted society is to discover which agency has primary jurisdiction in any specific instance. No human agency has final, total authority. Only God possesses absolute authority, an authority that He transfers in history only to His incarnate living Word, Jesus Christ,(13) to the Holy Spirit,(14) and to His incarnate written word, the Bible.(15)
The primary form of biblical government is always self-government. The primary agency of jurisdiction is the individual conscience. It has to be: only at this level does the individual law-enforcer have sufficiently accurate and detailed information regarding both his motivation and the results of his actions. Furthermore, only the individual can search his own heart, and even then, such knowledge is flawed. "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings" (Jer. 17:9-10). This is why God threatens eternal sanctions, positive and negative, on individuals: to persuade them to focus their attention in history on the requirement of obedience.
Adam was given a positive injunction: to dress and guard the garden (Gen. 2:15). He was also given a negative injunction: to avoid eating the fruit of a specific tree (Gen. 2:17). The first was a task of personal dominion. The second was a warning against false worship: eating a forbidden meal. Both stipulations necessarily involved corporate responsibility: familial (dominion) and ecclesiastical (communion). Corporate responsibility flows from individual responsibility. The point is, responsibility does flow outward from the individual. There is more to biblical responsibility than personal responsibility because personal responsibility in a covenantal order is necessarily representative. The representative models of the principle of representation are Adam and Christ.
The Mosaic law reflects this judicial fact of life, especially in Leviticus, the premier book of stipulations. Leviticus begins with ecclesiastical stipulations: priestly laws governing the representative sacrifices and laws governing the enforcement of covenantal boundaries, i.e., excommunication from the assembly. The feasts and ritual sacrifices of the Mosaic Covenant are obvious examples of priestly laws.(16) Next in number and importance are the family-related statutes, mainly laws controlling sexual deviation (Lev. 18; 20), personal ethics and land management (Lev. 19), and inheritance (Lev. 25). Civil statutes and civil sanctions are a distant fourth in both number and importance.
Body and Head
Obedience must be representative when God's sanctions are corporate. Certain individuals represent a larger body of individuals. The word body is covenantally appropriate: a head represents the other members.(17) This judicial principle provides us with no specific information regarding corporate ownership. The Mosaic law does, however. Leviticus 25 says a great deal about Old Covenant corporate ownership: it was familial. The jubilee law centered around a man's family inheritance, which was based in turn on God's original distribution of the land of Canaan to the Israelite conquerors. The crucial inheritance was judicial: the legal status of freeman. The far less important inheritance was geographical: a specific plot of ground. The primary role of civil government in Israel with respect to landed inheritance was to enforce the terms of the jubilee law.
The jubilee law was the most important corporate civil law in Mosaic Israel, for it established freemanship. This is what identified a free man, a man who could not be sold into permanent servitude with his family. There were other civil laws, but this was the archetype. The jubilee was not a law guaranteeing a specific economic income. It was instead a law establishing a legal right: an enforceable boundary around his legal status as a freeman.
The jubilee law served Mosaic Israel as a model for all civil legislation. It was primarily a defense of legal rights, not a promise of positive economic sanctions. It was God alone who promised positive economic sanctions, not the State. These positive sanctions came to individuals primarily through their families. The economic success of individuals and families determined the size of the tithe: positive sanctions to the church and State. Families also provided charity to the poor, under threat of church sanctions. The gleaning law served as the model of this form of charity: if a man did not work, neither did he eat. Men also received positive sanctions from the church through the Levites. Presumably, people received positive sanctions from voluntary, non-ecclesiastical organizations that served the poor, but there are no biblical injunctions in this regard.
Finally, there were civil sanctions, which were exclusively negative: to protect the nation from God's corporate negative sanctions in history. Faithfulness by the civil government in executing these negative sanctions would bring God's positive sanctions, most notably peace. It is the civil government's task to insure peace: defensive boundaries placed around violent people within the nation -- economic restitution, public flogging,(18) and public execution -- and a geographical defensive boundary placed around violent people outside the nation. Peace is God's national blessing: a successful quarantine against violence. This quarantine begins with the work of the conscience: "From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?" (James 4:1). It moves outward from the individual to the other covenantal institutions, and from there to all of society. It is the responsibility of civil magistrates to suppress external violence. This results in external peace. But without the grace of God in regenerating the souls of men, the civil suppression of violence cannot be maintained indefinitely. The fundamental form of government is self-government, not civil government.
Common Grace The question arises: Did the covenantal promises of Leviticus 26 perish with the other land laws of Israel? The law promised predictable blessings: "If ye walk in my statutes, and keep my commandments, and do them; Then I will give you rain in due season, and the land shall yield her increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit" (vv. 3-4). The New Testament seems to establish another principle, that of common grace: the rain falls on everyone indiscriminately, irrespective of covenantal status. The context of the New Testament teaching is individual behavior, but the sanctions are corporate:
Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect (Matt. 5:43-48; emphasis added).
The context of this passage is the rule of law: love thy neighbor. Here is the biblical principle of love: "Love worketh no ill to his neighbor: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law" (Rom. 13:10). We are to treat friends and enemies lawfully. This is the personal application of the Mosaic law's principle of equality before the law: "One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you" (Ex. 12:49). Nature's patterns affect all men the same in New Covenant history, sending rain and sun on good men and evil men. We are therefore to treat all men justly. In this passage, our righteous judgment is the equivalent of God's gift of rain and sun.
The focus of Jesus' discussion of the rain and sun in the Sermon on the Mount is God's unmerited gift of justice: every man is to be the recipient of justice. Antinomian commentators shift the focus of this passage from our righteous treatment of other men to another topic: God's universal distribution of blessings in history. These blessings are indeed universal, but they are also conditional. They are as conditional as the positive sanctions of God's law. The impartiality of God's justice mandates the conditionality of the blessings of justice. Every decision on our part must be ethically conditional, even the positive sanction of charity.(19) The context of the passage is the mandatory distribution of our justice. It is not, as Meredith G. Kline would have it, the general unpredictability of God's corporate sanctions in New Covenant history.(20) Rather, the point that Jesus was making is that men must be utterly predictable in administering civil justice. All negative sanctions must match those mandated by God. They are ideally to be as predictable as the universality of both rain and sunshine. These sanctions must be predictable because they are conditional. Where does God prescribe these civil sanctions? Where else but in His revealed law? Hope for a peaceful and prosperous land has been universal in man's history.
But there is a problem: the question of the rain. There is no explicit indication that the Levitical promise of rain in due season -- a unique positive sanction in the Mosaic law -- continues into the New Covenant era. Kline has correctly recognized that this indicates a shift from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant. Kline then extrapolates from Jesus' announcement of the visible randomness (i.e., covenantal unpredictability) of the rain in the New Covenant to the visible randomness of all the promised sanctions in the Mosaic law. What Kline does is to assume that the rain, which was an aspect of the land laws, represents all the corporate sanctions in the New Testament. This assumption is incorrect. If it were correct, there could be no uniquely biblical system of social theory.(21) This is why we must pay considerable attention to the positive covenantal sanction of rain in due season.
Rain in Due Season
The Levitical positive sanctions listed in the text are peace, wine, and bread. Rain in due season is a means of producing grain and grapes, meaning bread and wine. The rain is a blessing only insofar as it produces crops. Obviously, rain was no blessing in Noah's day. Too much rain ruins crops. So, the promise was for rain in due season. It would be just the right quantity of rain to produce the positive economic sanction of agricultural productivity.
The New Testament's teaching is that rain and sunshine fall on all men. This is God's common grace. The New Testament's emphasis here is on a common blessing. As I have already argued, the twin blessings of sunshine and rain are representative of God's blessing of righteous judgment, which His covenant people are to emulate. But both rain and sunshine can become common curses: rain becomes flooding; sunshine becomes drought. The question we must get answered is this: Is nature under the New Covenant a means of God's predictable covenantal sanctions in history? It was in Moses' day, at least inside the boundaries of the Promised Land. The land had vomited out the Canaanites:
Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you: And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants. Ye shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments, and shall not commit any of these abominations; neither any of your own nation, nor any stranger that sojourneth among you: (For all these abominations have the men of the land done, which were before you, and the land is defiled;) That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you (Lev. 18:24-28).
But after the Promised Land ceased to be a kingdom boundary,(22) did climate still play this judgmental role? No. Jesus today spews out His enemies, not the land. "So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth" (Rev. 3:16). Climate in the New Covenant has ceased to be a means of predictable covenantal judgment. What determines the fruitfulness of the field today is adherence to God's laws, including his laws of ownership. Put another way, a Christian nation whose civil government imposes socialist ownership will not enjoy the large number of external blessings experienced by a pagan nation whose civil government defends free market ownership. Also, if the two nations were to reverse their systems of ownership, there would be no predictable long-term reversal of rainfall and sunshine patterns within their respective geographical boundaries. The New Covenant moved from climate to society with respect to the locus of predictable sanctions. More to the point, this shift culminated a shift that had begun at the time of the conquest of the land. The earlier shift in the locus of sanctions had been a far more radical shift: from predictable manna outside the Promised Land to predictable inheritance without manna inside the Promised Land. When the Israelites crossed the boundary from the wilderness into Canaan, the source of their bread ceased to be manna. "And the manna ceased on the morrow after they had eaten of the old corn of the land; neither had the children of Israel manna any more; but they did eat of the fruit of the land of Canaan that year" (Josh. 5:12).
The Plow and the Plains
During the great westward expansion into the Great Plains of the United States, 1840-90, two myths competed for men's allegiance: the myth of the uncivilized wilderness vs. the myth of the garden. Both myths were based on environmental determinism. Beginning in the 1840's, some observers argued that the arid plains would make savages of civilized men. But as the American population moved westward, another myth slowly took shape, or more to the point, was shifted from the East to the Midwest: the myth of the garden. The coming of civilization would somehow increase the rainfall of the arid region.
Initially, the second myth was the product of unscientific dreams, but in the late 1870's, it began to gain scientific support, most notably from University of Nebraska scientist Samuel Aughey. The idea was encapsulated in 1881 by an epigram from Aughey's disciple, amateur scientist and professional town builder Charles Dana Wilber: "Rain Follows the Plough."(23) This was a secularization of the promise of Leviticus 26:4. Wilber wrote that "in this miracle of progress, the plow was the avant courier -- the unerring prophet -- the procuring cause. Not by any magic or enchantment, not by incantations or offerings, but, instead, in the sweat of his face, toiling with his hands, man can persuade the heavens to yield their treasures of dew and rain upon the land he has chosen for his dwelling place. It is indeed a grand consent, or, rather, concert of forces -- the human energy or toil, the vital seed, and the polished raindrop that never fails to fall in answer to the imploring power or prayer of labor."(24) The honest labor of the plowman would bring the rain. Man's sweat would bring nature's rain. This was an assertion that the curse of God (sweat) would bring the blessing of God (rain). Here was "works religion" with a vengeance.
The gigantic dust storms of the 1930's -- the "dust bowl" --disabused those who might otherwise have been tempted to perpetuate this myth. Year after year, these dust storms buried hundreds of thousands of square miles of land in many feet of air-borne dirt. There was literally darkness at noon. The sweat of man's brow was caked. Then the myth of the garden shifted: from the hard-working farmer to the scientific planner. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture began to preach a new gospel of works: the plow was destroying the soil.(25) The nation needed government-mandated soil conservation, voters were told.
The Resettlement Administration of the Department of Agriculture was ordered by its director, Rexford Guy Tugwell, one of the most notorious statists of the Roosevelt Administration (1933-1945),(26) to create a propaganda film promoting this viewpoint, The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936). It was written and directed by Pere Lorentz, a 30-year-old former West Virginian, who had been a New York movie critic and a Washington gossip columnist and political reporter. He had never before made a movie. He had written a pro-Roosevelt picture book, The Roosevelt Year (1934). The movie cost a minuscule $6,000(27) to produce, but was incredibly successful artistically. As a propaganda film of the era, it is matched only by Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin, silent movie defending the Bolshevik revolution, and by Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 promotion of Hitler and the Nazi Party, Triumph of the Will.(28) It was so successful that President Roosevelt established the U.S. Film Service in 1938, with Lorentz in charge.(29)
The Plow that Broke the Plains was so blatantly misleading in its splicing together of scenes, some of which historian James C. Malin says were faked, that a U.S. Senator and other critics forced it out of circulation in 1939.(30) The narrative suggested nothing specific in the way of a restoration program for the land. It ended with this evaluation: "The sun and winds wrote the most tragic chapter in American agriculture."(31) In the script, the plow is not blamed for the erosion of the soil, but this theme is communicated visually. As Lorentz later wrote, he relied primarily on pictures and music; he wrote the narrative only after the pictures and the music were finished.(32) (Lorentz died just before his book appeared in early 1992.)
With respect to the Midwest of the United States, the myth of the wilderness was superseded by the myth of the garden, which had two versions: the myth of the plow and the myth of the State. In each case, these myths rested on some version of autonomous man in the midst of an autonomous environment. God and His law had no place in any of these myths.
Coals of Fire
If rain in due season is a blessing, and if all of God's gifts are ethically conditional, then what is the nature of climate's conditionality? I have argued that the blessings of climate are analogous to -- representational of -- the blessing of God's predictable justice in history.(33) God tells His people to give good gifts -- render impartial justice -- to covenant-breakers, just as He sends rain and sunshine on sinners. There is an ulterior motive in such unmerited common grace: an escalation of their condemnation. In the section on justice in Romans, Paul quotes Proverbs 25:21-22. The passage in Proverbs reads: "If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he be thirsty, give him water to drink: For thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head, and the LORD shall reward thee." Here is how Paul applies this biblical principle of condemnation through mercy: "Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head. Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good" (Rom. 12:19-21).
At the very least, the common blessings of nature bring covenant-breakers under greater eternal condemnation. "But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more" (Luke 12:48). But what about in history? In what way is nature's ethically random distribution of gifts ethically conditional in history? We can be sure that those who receive such undeserved gifts heap up coals of fire on their unrepentant heads in eternity. What about in history?
Paul writes: "Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good" (v. 21). The goal here is the overcoming of Satan's kingdom. This victory is not confined to eternity. Satan's kingdom is obviously going to be overcome in eternity, with or without mercy from Christians in history. So, Paul's frame of reference in this passage has to be history. By showing mercy in history, Christians accomplish two things: they weaken some covenant-breakers' resistance to the truth, and they strengthen other covenant-breakers' resistance to the truth. That is, covenant-breakers' reactions to the gift of mercy vary in history. If their negative reactions to mercy always strengthened their resolve to defy God and His kingdom, and also always strengthened their ability to resist, or even left such strength "neutral," then how could showing mercy to evil men lead to the overcoming of evil with good? Wouldn't mercy in this case be counter-productive, strengthening evil men's will to resist and also their ability to resist God's kingdom? Wouldn't showing mercy then subsidize evil? Yet the Bible does not recommend that covenant-keeper subsidize evil.
This is why Paul does not presume that mercy always strengthens evil men's ability to resist the expansion of God's kingdom. On the contrary, he assumes that our showing mercy -- dealing lawfully with sinners -- leads to an expansion of the kingdom of God in history. In Romans 11, Paul prophesies an era of great blessings in history. Speaking of the future conversion of the Jews, Paul writes: "Now if the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles; how much more their fulness?" (Rom. 11:12). Romans 12 continues his message of victory in history. Good will overcome evil. This means that the merciful gift of God's civil justice in history will strengthen God's kingdom in history.
God's unmerited gifts in nature produce analogous effects. They progressively condemn covenant-breakers and bless covenant-keepers. While the rain in due season in the New Covenant era does not fall only on covenant-keepers or only on covenant-keeping societies, it does have kingdom-expanding effects in history. It brings covenant-breaking societies under God's condemnation. Jesus Christ will impose negative sanctions against them in history. Long-term rebellion increases the quantity of judgmental fire on their corporate heads. What is different in the New Covenant is that climate no longer imposes the negative sanctions. In Elijah's day, God withheld rain in Israel for several years in order to strengthen Elijah's position and weaken Ahab's resistance (I Ki. 17:1). This is no longer God's method of bringing negative sanctions in history. Climate is no longer God's covenantal agent. But, contrary to Kline in particular and amillennialists in general, this does not mean that God no longer brings predictable sanctions in history. His sanctions are no less real just because they are no longer delivered through climate. They are delivered through society.
Peace, Land, and Bread The language of Leviticus 26:3-6 is not only covenantal, it is in part sacramental. By identifying the vineyard and bread as the blessed products of the land, the Mosaic law invoked the language of Abrahamic Holy Communion: bread and wine (Gen. 14:18). The visible proof of God's communion with His people -- His residence inside Israel's boundaries -- was the four-fold blessing of peace and land, bread and wine.
The power of this sacramental language has not been lost on historians. This is especially obvious in standard accounts of the Russian Revolution, meaning the October revolution of 1917. It is not academically risky to point out that V. I. Lenin was one of the two greatest pamphleteers in history, matched only by Martin Luther. His slogan, "All power to the Soviets," was the Bolsheviks' most prominent rallying cry in the months after the first Russian Revolution of February/March, 1917,(34) but before the second revolution, the October/November revolution, in which the Bolsheviks seized power. The textbook account is that Lenin also employed another rhetorically powerful slogan: "Peace, land, and bread!"(35) This is such a powerful slogan that it is disappointing to learn that there is little first-hand evidence that the slogan was ever used in this form, but historians find it almost irresistible -- as irresistible as it supposedly was for Russian peasants.
The fact is, the Communists did not give the peasants their land; at best, they accelerated what had already begun when Lenin issued his November 8 decree, "Concerning the Land."(36) Then the Communists stole it back from them through collectivization. The peasants in the summer of 1917 had confiscated land that had been owned by the pre-Revolutionary land owners, months before the October Revolution.(37) Lenin had advocated this, but the peasants were way ahead of him. For this act of collective theft, the peasants subsequently paid far more than double restitution to the Communists. As many as 60 million of them paid with their lives, 1917-45: through famines, collectivization, and war. Starvation actually became public policy under Stalin during his forced collectivization of agriculture, 1930-33.(38) Paul wrote that he who does not work, let him not eat (II Thes. 3:10). Soviet totalitarianism reworked Paul's injunction: "In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat."(39)
Land and Liberty
The language of millennial peace was systematically employed to further the secular messianism of the Russian revolution, and not just during its Bolshevik phase. The power of this language is universal. The French Ambassador to the Russian court reported that on May 1, 1917 (Western calendar: May Day), he attended a large public meeting sponsored by the St. Petersburg soviet, or workers' council. He saw over 30 banners, and among the slogans were these: "Down with the War! . . . Long Live the internationalle! . . . We want Liberty, Land and Peace!"(40) The Communists did not control this meeting; it was sponsored by the city's soviet, which represented several socialist groups. These slogans had become common by 1917.
Land and Liberty (Zemla i Volya) had been the name of two separate Russian peasant organizations, a disorganized, pamphleteering, conspiratorial organization in the early 1860's(41) and a terrorist group in the late 1870's.(42) Alexander Kerensky, a moderate socialist and the Prime Minister of the Russian Duma (parliament) after July 7, 1917, appealed back to the first organization's populism(43) as enthusiastically as Lenin appealed back to the second organization's tradition of centralized authority.(44)
Lenin could hardly escape this legacy. His older brother Alexander had been executed as a result of this legacy. A tiny splinter group of the second Land and Liberty, the People's Will, successfully assassinated the liberal Czar Alexander II in 1881.(45) His successor, Alexander III, imposed a repressive regime, and during his reign, Lenin's brother, Alexander Ulyanov, was executed for having participated in a conspiracy to assassinate Alexander III. He had been arrested on March 1, 1887, seven years to the day after the assassination of Alexander II. He was a member of a group called the Terrorist Faction of the People's Will.(46) It was self-consciously an imitation of the original People's Will.
Three weeks before Lenin and the Bolsheviks staged their successful, bloodless coup, Lenin was hiding in Finland. He did not return to Russia until October 20 (Russian calendar), a week before the Bolsheviks' coup.(47) From this sanctuary, Lenin wrote a letter to the Communist Party's city conference in St. Petersburg on October 7. He recommended a three-part program as the basis of overthrowing the Kerensky government: 1) the transfer of additional land to the peasants, 2) the offer of an immediate and just peace to the Germans, and 3) anti-capitalist measures that would insure that the army received bread, clothing, and footwear.(48) This at least was reminiscent of the "peace, land, and bread" slogan. Liberty was missing from his list. It would remain missing in Russia for the next seven and a half decades.
Land would not prove sufficient to bring the blessings of bread to the Soviet Union. Daily bread in a self-sufficient Soviet Union would remain a failed dream of Communists, who were forced from the first coup to the second to rely on huge imports of food from the West. Liberty, not land, is the key element in successful agriculture. Poor land owned by free men is more productive than good land owned by the State and worked by slaves of the State. The commissars of Soviet agriculture could not admit this and remain alive in Stalin's day. After his death, they could not admit this and keep their jobs, which gave them State-subsidized access to the best imported food.
Soviet agriculture was always the greatest visible economic failure of Communism.(49) For decades, the tiny half-acre plots controlled by individual peasant families supplied a remarkable percentage of the nation's food. In the 1950's, something in the range of 30 percent of all Soviet agricultural output came from these small family plots, yet they received no allocation of fertilizer or equipment.(50) Four decades after the Revolution, three decades after Stalin collectivized agriculture, this private sector produced half of the nation's meat and potatoes and almost all of the eggs. Prior to World War I, 1909-1913, Russia exported more grain than any other nation: 30 percent of the world's total, 11 million metric tons per year.(51) After the revolution, this figure never exceeded 7.8 million,(52) achieved in 1962,(53) the year before the great reversal of Soviet agriculture. By 1981, the USSR was still a net importer of grain: 40 million metric tons.(54) For the entire era of the USSR, the huge collective farms and state farms struggled in vain to feed the Soviet population adequately. As late as 1953, the number of cattle was less than in 1916 on the same territory.(55) Russia did export grain after World War II, but only because the Communist State confiscated it to use as an export to gain Western currency. After the reversal of agricultural production under Khrushchev in 1963, the imports from the West began in earnest.(56) The Communist Party hierarchy removed Khrushchev from office in 1964, but the crisis could not be solved by Communist tinkering. The Soviets' dependence on imported grain was permanent. The USSR remained a net importer of grain -- paid for, decade after decade, by huge subsidies from Western governments -- when it collapsed politically in 1991 because the West refused to increase these subsidies.(57) In the 1971-73 period, the average Soviet agricultural worker harvested four and a half tons of grain per year; meanwhile, the average U.S. agricultural worker harvested over 54 tons.(58) Poor land and a short growing season were not the main reasons for Soviet food shortages; collectivist tyranny was.
A fence, either literal or judicial, separated the collective farm's property from the peasant family's property. On one side of this boundary, the land brought forth much fruit. On the other side, it brought forth so little fruit that the Soviet Union's leaders for seven decades blamed the agricultural shortfall on Russia's bad weather, usually drought. Here was an official implicit announcement of a stupendous and continuous national miracle: rain in Russia apparently fell on only one side of these fences.
Two Forms of Representation This preliminary discussion of Communist slogans and Soviet agriculture may seem far afield from the wilderness in which God's law was first given to Israel. The ultimate issue, however, has been as controversial in the twentieth century as in the days of Moses. The issue is: Who owns the land? The Bible is clear: God owns the land and everything on it. "For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills" (Ps. 50:10). The secondary question is this: Who acts as God's lawful agent in the administration of any given plot of land? It is this question that has divided Christians from very early days.
God delegates two forms of economic sovereignty to man: judicial sovereignty and market sovereignty. The first we call ownership; the second we call consumer sovereignty. Each has its own respective doctrine of representation. The jubilee land law makes it clear that the heirs of the families of the conquest possessed judicial authority over Israel's rural land. This does not mean that these families possessed economic authority over the land. Control over any economic resource must be defended in the market. The person who owns a scarce economic resource -- a resource that commands a price -- either serves those consumers who offer the high bids for the asset's fruits of production or else he must content himself with a reduced level of income. If he experiences reduced income, he thereby pays for the privilege of serving consumers other than those who offer the high bids. There is therefore a cost of serving low-bidding consumers: forfeited income. Over time, control of scarce resources moves, through the competitive bidding process, to those economic agents who most efficiently serve the consumers who offer the high bids. The profitable producers (consumer agents) buy productive assets from those who are less profitable.
The jubilee land law governed the leasing of rural land, and there is no question that resident aliens and converts to the faith could buy and sell individual plots of land for up to 49 years. Thus, economic sovereignty over the land remained in the hands of consumers. They could, through their decisions to buy or not buy, establish who their economic representatives would be. Those economic agents who were more responsive to the demands of consumers would prosper more than those who were less responsive. Those agents who prospered would be in a strong position to lease the key agricultural resource: land. The heirs of the conquest retained long-term legal sovereignty over the land as God's agents. The more productive farmers could nevertheless purchase economic sovereignty over the land as the consumers' agents. In 42 years out of 50, consumers were authorized by God to exercise primary sovereignty -- economic sovereignty -- through their agents: the more efficient farmers.
The primary mark of economic representation in Mosaic Israel was the lease. God delegated far more economic authority to the efficient producer than to the original owner. This points to the minimal economic impact of the jubilee land law. This law was not primarily economic; it was primarily judicial. It established freemanship, not a guaranteed income. In a free society, only consumers can establish a land owner's income, and consumers are notoriously fickle. They guarantee nothing to any of their representatives. "What have you done for me lately?" is their rallying cry. "What will you do for me now, and at what price?" is their battle cry. The sovereignty of the consumer rests on his right to change his mind until he signs a contract.
Conclusion God's covenantal sanctions in history are corporate. Positive sanctions rest on the obedience of individuals: representatives. The boundaries of Mosaic Israel were primarily judicial and secondarily geographical. Within these boundaries, climate itself was bound to the stipulations of God's national covenant. The rain would fall in due season if the nation's representatives remained faithful. These representatives included the high priest, priests in general, Levites, civil rulers, and heads of households.
The positive sanctions listed in this passage are land and peace, bread and wine. The Levitical laws governing ownership prove that it was not the civil government which was the primary representative agent in Mosaic Israel. It was not the State which was to create national economic planning for agriculture. The success or failure of Israel's agriculture depended on the obedience of the people, manifested publicly in the behavior of their representatives, i.e., their leaders. The primary form of government is self-government, and the leaders had to begin with self-government, as did every other Israelite. Corporate responsibility flows from individual responsibility.
The promised sanction of rain in due season was unique to Mosaic Israel. It was not a cross-boundary sanction. In the New Covenant, the universality of common grace governs the climate, just as it did outside of the place of residence of the Israelites under the Old Covenant. Rain and sunshine fall on covenant-breakers and covenant-keepers without distinction in the New Covenant. Climate is no longer God's agent of judicial sanctions. God's law governs man's legal relationships, and obedience to His law-order is what determines predictable corporate sanctions in New Covenant history. Societies can overcome the restraints (boundaries) of climate through obedience to God's law.
The doctrine of representation is inherent in any system of biblical authority. The judicial representatives of the land were the heirs of the conquest. The economic representatives of the consumers were those who were willing to buy their continued control over the land. Control over the land was to be maintained by those who used the land least wastefully in serving those who offered the high bids for the fruits of the land: consumers. It was the consumers' sovereignty over the land that Mosaic law defended in 49 years out of 50.
The covenantal promise of bread and wine has sacramental overtones. It points to the communion of God and man at a meal: the marriage supper of the lamb (Rev. 19:9). Israel was also promised land and peace. From an economic standpoint, land is not nearly so crucial as freedom in producing the largest possible quantities of bread and wine. The law of God provided freedom; the land was secondary. The law was given at Sinai before the generation of wandering. The stipulations would remain basic to continued prosperity in the land. Obedience was the foundation of the promised positive sanctions. Corporate prosperity is therefore ethically conditional.
Summary The covenantal blessings of Leviticus 26 are corporate.
Covenantally predictable sunshine and rain were land sanctions: unique to Mosaic Israel.
Outside of Israel's boundaries, other covenantally predictable sanctions did operate: Nineveh.
Without special grace, no society can maintain the covenant's external, common grace blessings indefinitely.
Corporate responsibility is representative.
Obedience is always partly individual.
Ten representatives would have sufficed to save Sodom.
In Elijah's day, 7,000 did not suffice to save Israel from captivity.
No percentage of citizens is mentioned in the Mosaic law as automatically establishing national representation.
In some cases, one man visibly represented Israel.
The high priest was the primary representative on a continuous basis, not the king.
The covenant's promises are ethical.
Ethics establishes boundaries of acceptable behavior.
These boundaries are not predominately civil.
They are covenantal: individual, familial, ecclesiastical, and civil.
No human agency has final, total authority in history.
Self-government is primary.
Information costs are lowest at this level of government.
Corporate responsibility flows from individual responsibility, beginning with Adam.
Leviticus begins with ecclesiastical stipulations.
Next were family stipulations (Lev. 18; 20).
Next came personal stipulations (Lev. 19; 25).
Fourth in importance came civil stipulations.
Corporate sanctions invoke representative government: body and head.
Leviticus 25 indicates that Mosaic ownership was familial.
The crucial inheritance was freemanship.
The State was to enforce God's lease contract in year 50.
The jubilee law was the most important corporate civil law in Mosaic Israel: the freemanship law.
Freemanship was an enforceable judicial boundary.
The jubilee law was primarily a defense of legal rights.
God alone promised positive economic sanctions, not the State.
God's primary means of blessing is through the family.
Civil sanctions are exclusively negative: to insure peace.
Peace means placing a quarantine around violence and fraud.
This quarantine begins with conscience.
It moves to family government.
Civil government can sustain peace only through God's common grace, and ultimately through special grace.
The blessing of rain was God's response to obedience (Lev. 26:4).
The blessings of sunshine and rain are now common (Matt. 5:45).
The focus of Jesus' teaching was Christians' righteous judgment: showing equal justice to all, analogous to sunshine and rain.
God's justice is impartial and therefore ethically conditional.
Rain in due season is not representative of all of God's common grace blessings in the New Covenant, contrary to Kline's assumption.
Rain is a blessing in the context of agriculture.
Rain produces grain and grapes: bread and wine.
Rain and sunshine can become common curses: flooding and drought.
Climate is not the means of God's predictable covenant sanctions in the New Testament economy.
It was in Moses' day.
When the Promised Land ceased to be a kingdom boundary, climate ceased to be the means of predictable blessing and cursing.
The locus of predictable sanctions moved from climate to society.
This process had begun at the conquest: from predictable manna to predictable inheritance.
The American myth of the plow and the plains was a myth of environmental determinism: works religion.
The predictability of climate's sanctions in Mosaic Israel was representative of God's predictable justice in history.
By showing equally impartial grace, Christians bring covenant-breakers under God's condemnation (Rom. 12:19-21).
Our mercy overcomes Satan's kingdom in history: a means of Christianity's historical dominion.
Rebellion against common grace increases the wrath of God in history against evil-doers.
Peace and land were Mosaic covenantal sanctions.
Bread and wine were Abrahamic sacramental sanctions (Gen. 14:18).
Lenin used such language as religious-political slogans in 1917.
Liberty was missing from his slogan: the source of the other blessings.
Who owned the Promised Land? God.
Who acted as God's judicial agents in administering the land? Heirs of the conquest's families: owners.
Who acted as God's economic agents? Consumers, whose decisions allocated ownership of rural land.
The jubilee transferred ownership to the heirs: one year in 50.
Economic representation was manifested by the lease.
Footnotes:
1. It is a theologically and psychologically disastrous misinterpretation of God's promises of wealth to place them within an exclusively personal or individual framework. The individualism of the "positive confession" charismatic movement is an example of just such a false interpretation of covenantal, corporate promises. God's blessings are not successfully invoked verbally; they are invoked corporately and ethically. Individual Christians are not supposed to "name it and claim it." Instead, we are to do the following: obey God personally by following His law; pray for the widespread movement of the Holy Spirit in what is called revival; work toward a corporate, constitutional, and civil affirmation of the absolute authority of the God of the Bible; and hope for the best until these covenantal requirements are met. Only after this can we be confident about predictable, sustainable corporate blessings.
2. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), ch. 6.
3. This is why Egypt was not brought to saving faith under Joseph. We know this because there was no covenantal succession; every Egyptian family suffered the death of the firstborn at the exodus. Egypt's faith was a common grace faith.
4. Peace might be considered the absence of war, but given the condition of mankind after Adam's rebellion, it takes God's active grace to bring peace to man. Peace is not normal even though it is normative. Peace is not passive. War and sin are the passive condition of covenant-breaking man (James 4:1).
5. The law's visible sanctions are more predictable at the final judgment.
6. "And one of them, named Caiaphas, being the high priest that same year, said unto them, Ye know nothing at all, Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not. And this spake he not of himself: but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation; And not for that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad" (John 11:49-52).
7. David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987).
8. In most cases, this would have been a circumcised male. In the case of widows and divorced women, they became the heads of their households, for they were required to fulfill their vows without initial approval by a male (Num. 30:9).
9. During the feast of tabernacles, Israel sacrificed a total of 70 bulls for the 70 nations (Jud. 1:7), plus one for Israel (Num. 29:13-36).
10. A representative discussion is Bertrand de Jouvenal, Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good (University of Chicago Press, 1957). The author was a conservative. This book was a companion volume to his equally political study, Power: The Natural History of Its Growth (rev. ed.; London: Batchworth, [1945] 1952).
11. R. J. Rushdoony, The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy (Fairfax, Virginia: Thoburn Press, [1971] 1978), chaps. 3-5.
12. Even during wartime, politicians should strive to let the market allocate resources in most instances. Fiscal policy -- taxing and spending -- not monetary inflation coupled with a system of compulsory rationing, should be the primary control device. This enables producers to make rational decisions about what to produce. The profit system motivates producers to create the most efficient weapons. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1949), ch. 34, sect. 2.
13. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made" (John 1:1-3).
14. Jesus said: "But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me" (John 15:26). "Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come" (John 16:13).
15. Jesus said: "I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world" (John 17:14). "Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth" (John 17:17). Paul wrote: "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness" (II Tim. 3:16).
16. In the New Covenant, the one feast is the Lord's Supper, which is the heir of the Passover and the other Mosaic Covenant feasts.
17. "For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body" (Eph. 5:23). "And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence" (Col. 1:18).
18. The limit is 40 lashes (Deut. 25:3). It is worth noting that Noah's flood came from 40 days of rain, and Christ's encounter with Satan came after 40 days of temptation in the wilderness (Luke 4:2).
19. Ray R. Sutton, "Whose Conditions for Charity?" in Gary North (ed.), Theonomy: An Informed Response (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1991), ch. 9.
20. "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." Meredith G. Kline, "Comments on an Old-New Error," Westminster Theological Journal, XLI (Fall 1978), p. 184.
21. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), chaps. 7, 8.
22. Jesus warned the Pharisees: "Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof" (Matt. 21:43).
23. Charles Dana Wilber, The Great Valleys and Prairies of Nebraska and the Northwest (1881), p. 69; cited by Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, [1950] 1978), p. 182.
24. Wilber, ibid., p. 70; in idem.
25. The Department of Agriculture was headed by Henry A. Wallace, a seed company millionaire and an occult mystic: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), pp. 31-34. He persuaded the Secretary of the Treasury to place the Masonic pyramid and all-seeing eye on the back of the one dollar bill: ibid., p. 31. The AAA was the first department to be heavily infiltrated by the Communists, 1933-35: the "Ware cell." Schlesinger writes: "For the Communist party, the AAA group was a staging area for personnel, not a fulcrum for policy." Schlesinger, New Deal, p. 54.
26. Bernard Sternsher, Rexford Guy Tugwell and the New Deal (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1964); R. G. Tugwell, The Brains Trust (New York: Viking, 1968). Four decades later, Tugwell had published under his name a book, The Emerging Constitution (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). This was the result of a decade of work by a hundred people, funded by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, which had published an early draft in its Center Magazine (Sept./Oct. 1970). The book was a draft for a radically revised U.S. Constitution.
27. At $35/ounce of gold, this was about 171 ounces of gold.
28. Riefenstahl is still alive as I write this. She regrets ever having worked on this film. She claims that Hitler forced her to make the film. "Buried in Hitler's ashes," Washington Times (Nov. 11, 1992).
29. The standard account of his career is Robert L. Snyder, Pare Lorentz and the Documentary Film (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968).
30. James C. Malin, The Grassland of North America (Lawrence, Kansas: By the Author, 1961), pp. 134-37. Malin was a distinguished regional historian who taught at the University of Kansas.
31. A full transcript of the film's script appears in Pere Lorentz, FDR's Moviemaker: Memoirs and Scripts (Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 1992), pp. 44-50.
32. Ibid., pp. 39-43. Lorentz followed this movie with The River (1938), a promotion for the national government's rural electrification and flood control project, the Tennessee Valley Authority, but disguised as a history of the Mississippi River. President Roosevelt personally hired him to produce more propaganda films after seeing The River at a special screening at his home in Hyde Park. Ibid., pp. 55-56. Decades later, in 1981, these two films were given a special salute by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and he subsequently received several awards. Ibid., p. 233.
33. Such justice ceases to be a blessing for covenant-breakers in eternity.
34. The earlier months (February, October) are based on Russia's old style calendar.
35. Peter Gay and R. K. Webb, Modern Europe (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 954.
36. Lazar Volin, A Century of Russian Agriculture: From Alexander II to Khrushchev (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 128.
37. Warren Bartlett Walsh, Russia and the Soviet Union: A Modern History (rev. ed.; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), p. 384.
38. Miron Dolot, Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust (New York: Norton, 1985).
39. Attributed to Leon Trotsky by F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (University of Chicago Press, 1944), p. 119.
40. Maurice Paléologue, An Ambassador's Memoirs, 3 vols. (4th ed.; New York: Doran, 1925), III, p. 325.
41. Adam B. Ulam, Russia's Failed Revolutions: From the Decembrists to the Dissidents (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981), pp. 105-12, 116-17, 119-21. Ulam writes that "Land and Freedom was a revolutionary party which never succeeded in fully organizing itself -- a conspiracy which never carried its conspiratorial activities to the point of planning, let alone attempting to seize power" (p. 111).
42. Ibid., pp. 126-27; Ulam, In the Name of the People (New York: Viking, 1977), p. 288.
43. Paléologue, Memoirs, III, p. 301.
44. V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? (1902), in Lenin, Collected Works, 45 vols. (Moscow: Progress Press, 1973), V, p. 474.
45. Ulam, In the Name of the People, chaps. 12, 13.
46. Ibid., pp. 392-93; cf. Rolf H. W. Theen, Lenin: Genesis and Development of a Revolutionary (New York: Lippencott, 1973), pp. 40-41.
47. Robert Payne, Lenin (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964), p. 362. It is one of the most extraordinary facts of the twentieth century that the Communists fell from power just as they had come into power: in a near-bloodless coup that lasted less than a week: August 19-21, 1991. Only three people were shot during this failed coup. The military refused to support the Communist regime in Moscow, exactly as the military had failed to support the socialist regime during Lenin's coup.
48. "Lenin to the Petrograd City Conference," Collected Works, XXVI, p. 148.
49. The other perpetual economic failure was the shortage of housing, but the annual need to import food from abroad could not be concealed internationally; the housing shortage was less visible to outsiders.
50. Alec Nove, "The Incomes of Soviet Peasants," The Slavonic and East European Review, XXXVIII (1960), p. 330.
51. Volin, Russian Agriculture, p. 110.
52. Marshall I. Goldman, USSR in Crisis: The Failure of an Economic System (New York: Norton, 1983), p. 63.
53. Ibid., p. 64.
54. Ibid., p. 65.
55. Volin, Russian Agriculture, p. 562.
56. Ibid., p. 566.
57. This collapse had been predicted two years before by Judy Shelton: The Coming Soviet Crash: Gorbachev's Desperate Pursuit of Credit in Western Financial Markets (New York: Macmillan, 1989). Two years after this economic collapse and his removal from office, Gorbachev was in charge of the Green Cross, an international ecological propaganda organization. His headquarters were in the Presidio, the recently closed U.S. Army base in San Francisco. This was the fate of the national leader who the U.S. government had spent $300 billion a year to defend against in the late 1980's-- all the while supporting him and his regime with U.S. taxpayer-funded food. Such is late twentieth-century politics. Who won? The huge U.S. grain conglomerates and the armaments industry. For the sordid story of seven decades of U.S. aid to the USSR, see Antony Sutton, The Best Enemy Money Can Buy (Billings, Montana: Liberty House, 1986). I wrote the Foreword.
58. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present (New York: Summit, [1982] 1986), p. 633.
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