LAW AND INHERITANCE Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates (Deut. 6:4-9).
This passage begins with what have become the most famous words of Judaism, "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD," called the shawmah Israel, or "hear, Israel." In Hebrew, the word for "hear" is the word for "obey": shawmah. The passage then adds what became some of the most famous words of Jesus: "And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might" (v. 5).(1) Moses then told the nation that these words must become central to the nation, with each father teaching them to his son from morning to night (v. 7). The theocentric focus of this law is obvious: God as the one and only God.
The phrase "morning to night" indicates the comprehensive authority of biblical law. All day long, the law of God applies to the affairs of men. Fathers were to spend time with their sons, either in the fields or in the family business. Sons were to receive knowledge of the law in the context of profitable labor. The familiar phrase, "learning by doing," was applicable. It was a system of instruction we might call "learning while doing." The law was not some abstract legal code. It was an integrated system of rules that was supposed to be taught in the context of daily living. God's Bible-revealed law was not to become peripheral in the lives of God's covenant people. It was to be central. It was to govern men's activities throughout the day. It was to be memorized, discussed, and acted upon by young and old. Fathers were not to tell their sons, "Do as I say, not as I do." Their lives were to become consistent with their words. The sons would hear God's law and see their fathers carrying it out. This law mandated a mastery of the details of biblical law to all those who were covenanted to Him.
All of this has been lost to modern man. Today, formal education is not Bible-based, family-based, occupation-based, or personal. It is humanism-based, State-based, abstract, and bureaucratic. It is also intensely feminine in the early years.
The Feminization of Early Education One of the monumental and as yet unsolved problems of modern society is that women teach boys: either mothers or female school teachers. The context of teaching is the classroom or home, not the work place. This means that education for males has moved away from the father-son apprenticeship model, which was clearly the Mosaic norm, to the classroom, where education is bureaucratic, impersonal, and abstract -- separated from a father's discipline and his occupation. This is also generally true of home scholing. Education in the modern world is almost completely feminized until the high school level.
There are economic factors for this change. Women can be employed less expensively than men. Their income is normally supplemental to their husbands' income, or else they are single and can share the expenses of an apartment with other women. They can afford to work for less than a man can, especially a married man. The "school marm" has been a fixture of American education since at least the mid-nineteenth century. When the knowledge of Latin ceased to be the criterion for all teaching positions, women began to replace men as teachers below the college level. College education was closed to all but a tiny minority, mainly masculine, throughout the world until the late nineteenth century. In the United States, the creation of state-funded land-grant universities, beginning with Federal legislation that set aside Federal land for state-funded agricultural schools (1862), changed this by opening up college to both sexes. The elective system, which scrapped compulsory Latin and classical education, as well as compulsory chapel attendance, began at Harvard University in the 1880's and spread rapidly.(2) This moved higher education from theology -- Latin had for centuries been the international language of theologians(3) -- to science and the liberal arts. This was a worldwide shift in higher education. It replaced knowledge of Latin with the college diploma as the basis of access to teaching and ministerial positions. But college attendance was still highly restricted until after World War I. The great expansion of State-funded college education came after World War II. Women gained equal access to higher education, both economically and legally. Nevertheless, more than any other college major except possibly home economics, elementary education has been the choice of women, which is why it has the lowest prestige of any field except home economics.
There is another important economic reason for the abandonment of apprenticeship: the extension of division of labor made possible by modern capital accumulation. Specialization accompanies capitalization. Fathers today are employees, not owners. They are not given time by their employers to teach their sons on the job. The extreme division of labor made possible by modern capitalism makes it unlikely that a son will follow his father in a family business. There is no family business, and the son's skills are different from his father's. A father cannot easily teach his sons their lifetime trade. Men change occupations several times in a career. The restructuring of modern corporations due to international competition is now threatening the lifetime employment practices of earlier generations, even in patriarchal Japan. So, education has to be performed in a specialized classroom setting, as it has always been for the very rich and well-placed elite corps of students who have been trained to staff the bureaucracies in man's history. But what has worked well for an educated and privileged elite has not worked equally well for the mass of students. Beyond basic literacy, the training appropriate for an elite bureaucracy is different from the training appropriate for students who do not fit into a book-oriented bureaucratic setting. Meanwhile, the impersonalism of a classroom has replaced the personalism of apprenticeship all over the world.
The feminization of American culture begins in the grammar school classroom. Socially, it is regarded as "women's work" to teach young children. There is a social stigma attached to men who teach young children.(4) Thus, the success indicators of American education through age 11 or 12 are female standards: sitting quietly at a desk, good penmanship, neatness, and unquestioned subordination to authority. Boys who meet these criteria tend to be regarded by other boys as sissies, i.e., imitation girls: non-athletic, non-confrontational, and bookish. There is a stigma attached to "book learning" for little boys. Mark Twain's character Huckleberry Finn is representative. Huck is an outdoorsman, someone who cannot stand Aunt Polly's feminine world. His friend Tom Sawyer is somewhere in between, but it is Huck, not Tom, who incarnates the masculine image of mid-nineteenth-century American youth.
For a century, the Boy Scouts offered an extra-curricular alternative to the feminized classroom, but scouting came midway in a boy's life. The Cub Scouts, a later development than the Boy Scouts, is run by mothers. Male scoutmasters run the Boy Scouts; boys are eligible when they turn 10½. Scouting has faded in popularity in the late twentieth century, reducing boys' personal contact with masculine authority except in the principal's office. Positive sanctions and most negative sanctions are imposed by women until children reach high school. In the final two years of high school, boys' academic achievement shoots ahead of girls' achievement in math and science, but this comes at age 15 or 16, late in the maturity process.(5)
In the final decades of twentieth-century, the gang has replaced the family for teenage ghetto youths whose fathers are either absent or ineffectual. The gang is exclusively male, although there are female gangs that are extensions of male gangs. The gang is bound by a self-maledictory blood oath and some form of initiation rite of passage. It becomes the educator for rebellious young men who have rejected the public school. It is far closer to the apprenticeship ideal. It offers an apprenticeship in crime.
The Myth of Religious Neutrality
The move from the personalism of apprenticeship to the impersonalism of the classroom is economics-driven: a group of parents shares the cost of a tutor. There is a loss of personalism. There is a move from practical wisdom to instruction in abstract material and rote memorization. This is a continuing problem for modern education, as it has always been in bureaucratic or priestly education. The medical profession in the twentieth century has adopted internship as a way to imitate apprenticeship: on-the-job training after graduation from medical school.(6)
The decline of apprenticeship has paralleled the rise of secular education: results-based rather than ethics-based. The sellers of educational services have always sought access to a wider market of potential buyers by establishing common-ground, religiously neutral education. This has been going on since the earliest days of university education in the twelfth century: the rise of scholasticism and also the revival of Roman law at the University of Bologna.(7) Specialized instruction in technological fields also lends itself to the myth of neutrality. Graduate school education in the United States, except for theological seminaries, has been secular from its origins in the final quarter of the nineteenth century.(8)
The advent of Unitarian, state-funded education in nineteenth-century America separated religious confession from education. Progressive education has always been messianic: the substitution of the government school for God as the agent of redemption.(9) It has been at war with the educational criteria of Deuteronomy 6.
Solutions
Parents have the legal option of delegating authority to other teachers. The classic biblical example of this is God's delegation of authority over His son to earthly parents. The Old Covenant example is the Hannah's vow to delegate Samuel's upbringing to Eli the priest (I Sam. 1). The parent must be sure that the teacher will be equally faithful in teaching the law to the child. A parent can send his child to live with a man who will apprentice the child. Also, a parent can hire a tutor, which is a traditional exception to direct parent-child instruction. This is an expensive solution. Both approaches retain the personalism of parent-child instruction.
There are those who reject the biblical right of the parent to delegate the teaching function, but all such objections end at the time that the child is eligible for college. At age 18, the critics of earlier delegated education insist that the parent now possesses this right of delegation. The child is said to have become accountable, and the parent therefore becomes free from the teaching obligation when the child graduates from high school. Yet the parent still pays the child's bills. In the Mosaic covenant, reaching age 20 authorized a man to join God's holy army (Ex. 30:14).(10)
Parents are required by God's law to educate their children, morning to evening. But because of the division of labor, some parents are better teachers than others. As specialization increases, the teaching skills of some parents become more evident. Parents will trade off: one parent comes in and teaches a group of students math and science; another teaches music; another teaches a foreign language. To deny the legitimacy of joint teaching is to assert the ridiculous: the equal ability of all people in every field.(11) The assertion that a mother may not lawfully teach any children but her own is an assertion that: 1) all mothers are equally gifted teachers; or 2) any differences in teaching skills are irrelevant or insignificant in the outcome of education; or 3) children should be deprived of the specialized skills of several teachers until after high school. All three arguments are doomed. Parental concern for their children's education, as well as widespread parental exhaustion and defeat in the face of chemistry, physics, and calculus, will eventually overcome the arguments of the "parents-only" purists. Only if some impersonal high school curriculum appears in which the children teach themselves, either by computer or by private study, can the parents-only argument become remotely plausible. But even in such a case, the parent must delegate instructional responsibilities to the author of the software or the books. We are back to square one: parents are commanded to teach their children by means of biblical law. Either this responsibility may be delegated or else all programmed education from outside the family must cease.
Parental sovereignty over education must be restored. The fundamental starting point in the reconstruction of education is therefore the removal of all State funding and regulations. This includes tax-funded educational vouchers.(12) Economic sovereignty must match legal sovereignty. He who pays the piper should call the tune.
The Covenant Model The entire passage, Deuteronomy 6:4-15, constitutes a single covenantal command. The structure of this passage parallels the biblical covenant model: all five points. Point one, transcendence/presence, is summarized by the opening: "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD." This God is the Creator God of the patriarchs. He is not some local deity. He speaks with a unified voice. He speaks to men clearly in the midst of history.
Point two, hierarchy/authority, is seen in the command to love Him, and not just love Him, but love Him with everything man has at his disposal: heart, soul, and strength. Men must place their lives at God's disposal, doing in love whatever He commands.
Point three, ethics/boundaries, is found in the command to place God's words or commandments at the center of our lives. Men must teach these laws to their children down through the generations. Biblical law is to become the framework of interpretation of every person's life, governing what he does and says from morning to night. Even the boundaries of a man's house were supposed to be marked by the presence of the written law.
Point four, oath/sanctions, appears in the next section of the passage. God promises to deliver the wealth of the Canaanites into the hands of the Israelites. For the Canaanites, this will constitute negative sanctions. For Israel, it will constitute positive sanctions.
And it shall be, when the LORD thy God shall have brought thee into the land which he sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give thee great and goodly cities, which thou buildedst not, And houses full of all good things, which thou filledst not, and wells digged, which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not; when thou shalt have eaten and be full; Then beware lest thou forget the LORD, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage (vv. 10-12).
The Israelites were told to fear God because of this, and to swear their oaths by His name: "Thou shalt fear the LORD thy God, and serve him, and shalt swear by his name" (v. 13).
Point five, succession/inheritance, is found in the covenantal threat of disinheritance: "Ye shall not go after other gods, of the gods of the people which are round about you; (For the LORD thy God is a jealous God among you) lest the anger of the LORD thy God be kindled against thee, and destroy thee from off the face of the earth" (vv. 14-15).
This passage later became the legal basis for the covenant lawsuits brought by the prophets against Israel. Here, in one brief passage, we find the outline of God's covenantal dealings with Israel until the temple was destroyed in A.D. 70. As a geographically based nation, Israel was removed twice from the land: at the captivity and at the diaspora under Rome. They were scattered across the face of the earth. But as a people, they were not destroyed from the face of the earth. After their return from the exile, Jews did not again pursue the gods around them. After the diaspora under Rome, they remained an identifiable people.
The problem today is the growing sophistication of covenant-breakers. The gods of Canaan did not reappear in history. Other gods did. They have offered power and influence -- positive sanctions -- to those who are willing to worship them. Such worship has become progressively more intellectual and moral than liturgical, more a matter of replacing biblical laws with other laws. Rather than teaching one's sons the law of God, men have turned over their sons to be trained by certified educators who are more far familiar with rhetoric than law.
Teaching the Next Generation The passage following this one instructs covenant-keepers to instruct their children in the law of God. Parents are warned that children will ask questions about the meaning of God's law. "And when thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying, What mean the testimonies, and the statutes, and the judgments, which the LORD our God hath commanded you?" (Deut. 6:20). We might expect the required answer to be related to the person of God, holiness of God, or some other lofty speculation. Not so. The answer is to be tied to the corporate blessings of God in history.
Then thou shalt say unto thy son, We were Pharaoh's bondmen in Egypt; and the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand: And the LORD shewed signs and wonders, great and sore, upon Egypt, upon Pharaoh, and upon all his household, before our eyes: And he brought us out from thence, that he might bring us in, to give us the land which he sware unto our fathers. And the LORD commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear the LORD our God, for our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as it is at this day. And it shall be our righteousness, if we observe to do all these commandments before the LORD our God, as he hath commanded us (vv. 21-25).
God had delivered them from bondage in Egypt. Then He had imposed negative sanctions on Pharaoh and his household. Next, He had brought them into the Promised Land. This was the fulfillment of a promise to the patriarchs. God commanded Israel to obey Him, "for our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as it is at this day." That is, God has established a cause-and-effect relationship in history between covenant-keeping and corporate blessings. The basis of Israel's preservation of its inheritance in the land was covenantal obedience to the specific terms of God's revealed law. The children of Israelites were to be instructed in two things: the history of Israel and the law of God. They were to be told that these two courses of study are covenantally related. The basis of the relationship between history and law is point four of the biblical covenant model: sanctions.
A mark of rebellion against God's covenant is the denial of this fixed relationship. To study history apart from God's law is to lay the foundation for national disinheritance. If the events of history have nothing predictable to do with God's law, then history becomes the product of forces other than God and His covenant. God's law then becomes, at best, a guide for personal ethics, a guide that cannot definitively be shown to advance the careers of those who adhere to it.
It is basic to modern Christian theology to deny that such a corporate cause-and-effect relationship exists in New Testament times. If it did exist, then Christians would be compelled to preach, teach, and obey biblical law if they want to prosper. This thought is anathema to modern theologians, so they deny that success in history has anything to do with God's law as revealed in the Bible, especially the Old Testament. Calvinist theologian Meredith G. Kline writes that ethical cause and effect in history are, humanly speaking, essentially random. "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."(13)
If they had ever heard about it, Kline's position would be too much for most Christians. You have to be trained for years as a professional theologian in order to believe anything as ethically antinomian and as culturally futile as Kline's position. Christians find it difficult to teach their children that obedience to God produces random results in history, whether corporately or personally. So, they search for common-ground ethical principles of individual action, hopefully shared by all honest men, that will reintroduce ethics into the discussion of historical cause and effect, but without any invocation of the Bible and God's predictable sanctions, which would reintroduce the embarrassing issue of biblical law. They are apt to cite Benjamin Franklin's famous eighteenth-century motto in Poor Richard's Almanack, "Honesty is the best policy." This is a statement of personal faith rather than a developed social theory. This declaration is devoid of biblical covenantal content because: 1) the definition of honesty is not tied to the Bible; 2) the definition of "best" is not tied to the Bible; and 3) there is no way to demonstrate a link between the two.
There is a practical problem with Franklin's motto. With no explicit biblical laws to adhere to, no God-invoked historical sanctions to undergird it, and no common definition of "best policy," this common-ground humanist faith can lead to a morally questionable career such as Franklin's. He hired men to serve under him who he knew were British spies, most notably Edward Bancroft, during his term of service as an ambassador to France during the American Revolution. He refused to tighten security in the Paris office, despite continual warnings to do so. He met secretly with Paul Wentworth, the head of Britain's agents in France. He was known to the British secret service as "72" and "our leading man." Franklin's biographer Cecil Currey concluded: "Benjamin Franklin wanted to win the American Revolution. No matter who lost -- the United States, France, England -- Benjamin Franklin wanted to win. In some ways he did. His honor remained intact. He gained new renown. He was rewarded by a grateful nation with additional positions of public responsibility. His secrets generally remained hidden."(14) In Franklin's case, dishonesty was the best policy during his career in France. If America lost, he would survive as a covert friend of Britain; if America won, nobody would believe his duplicity other than his political enemy John Adams and his fellow ambassador in Paris, Arthur Lee, both of whom suspected him. He got away with it. (Two professional historians have written on Franklin's status as a possible double agent and ally of British spies. One did so anonymously and did not go into teaching;(15) the other saw his book consigned to what he later called "historical limbo."(16))
The problem is, those who say they are God's chosen people have been hesitant or openly resistant to teaching their children that God commands obedience and imposes sanctions in history in terms of this obedience. They have tried to find alternatives to such a revelationally grounded concept of historical cause and effect. They have sought broader ethical principles that have been sanctioned by covenant-breakers. In short, they have substituted new laws for old and new sanctions for old, which ultimately implies new gods for old.
New Gods for Old Consider post-exilic Israel. The experience of the exile broke Israel's habit of worshipping the idols of the land of Canaan. But the people continued to substitute new gods for old. In the name of the God of the Bible, they worshipped more subtle gods than those represented by physical idols. Greek philosophy and literature became a snare for a minority of well-connected Jews during the three centuries before the birth of Jesus. This was Judaic Hellenism. But the Jews' commitment to cosmopolitan Hellenism did not overcome their commitment to a proto-Talmudic law.(17)
The idols of ancient paganism were deaf, dumb, and blind (II Ki. 19:17-18; Dan. 5:23). They judicially represented demonic forces whose offer of power and wealth was limited to geographical regions. They were not universal gods. To sustain an empire, a ruler had to destroy the authority of local gods by destroying their temples and their cities' walls or by removing the people from their walled city-states. The smashing of a city's walls represented the destruction of its gods, as the fall of Jericho indicated. Jericho was Israel's model: total destruction. But this was a one-time event. For the inheritance to survive, Israel could not repeat this act of total devastation. Instead, Israel was commanded to commit genocide or remove from the nation all of the inhabitants of Canaan's cities. This was why God allowed Israel to leave the cities' walls intact: the removal of the former residents was sufficient. But this complete removal was also covenantally necessary: should any of them remain in the land, they would lead the Israelites into false worship (Deut. 7:1-5).
After the exile, the Jews faced a new problem: syncretism. The religion of the empires was a religion of cooperating gods. The heart of this religion was politics. The political order replaced the priestly order. The various priesthoods became functionaries of the State. Their task was to secure the favor of all of the gods of the conquered cities. Today, we call this religion pluralism. While the modern world's version of syncretism is not openly idolatrous, the result is the same: the substitution of political salvation in history for the rule of local gods.(18)
Covenant-Keeping and Worldly Success Deuteronomy 4 identifies covenantal faithfulness as the basis of continued dominion in the Promised Land. The sanction of removal from the land is clearly a negative sanction, a divine punishment. The implication is that covenantal faithfulness brings positive sanctions: economic success. We read in Deuteronomy 8 that compound economic growth is a public testimony to the cause-and-effect relationship between man's covenantal faithfulness and God's positive sanctions in history. "But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day" (Deut. 8:18).
The problem is that the positive sanctions can lead to covenantal rebellion: "And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth" (Deut. 8:17). The blessing of God can become the basis of covenant-breaking man's belief in the autonomy of man. The blessing becomes a snare. The gods of modernism are the gods of man's autonomy. They are the product of mankind's success. The gods of modernism are secularized versions of covenantal truths. Does number really rule the world? No, but God in His wisdom created a world in which some of the numerical inter-relationships discoverable through man's mind are found to govern some of the operations of nature, thereby making science possible. Is compound economic growth really possible? Yes, for a time, when men honor God's law, especially God's laws restricting the claims of the State on the wealth of men (I Sam. 8:15, 17). But time will run out -- something that compound growth in a finite world points to. Is science a tool of dominion? Yes, but not when scientists adopt theories of origin and providence that place impersonal randomness and unbreakable law on the dialectical throne of an autonomous universe.
The legitimate goal of success in history is to be attained by the means of grace. The covenantal faithfulness of God's people leads to success. Success can be sustained, however, only by continuing covenantal faithfulness. When men believe they have discovered the secret of compound growth apart from the law of God, they have said in their heart that the power of man's mind in guiding his hand is the source of our wealth. This confession of faith is the essence of modernism. It is the mark of apostasy. A world built in terms of such a confession cannot be sustained long term.
Conclusion The command to worship God by obeying His law was tied to sanctions: positive (inheritance) and negative (disinheritance). The ultimate threat to the Israelites was that God would remove them from the land if they worshipped the gods of Canaan. This was a land-based command. The gods of Canaan were the great threat to them: land-based gods. If the Israelites did not have the moral strength to separate themselves spiritually and ritually from the gods of the land, God would separate them from both the land and its gods.
The sanctions related specifically to the inheritance and disinheritance of the land of promise. This threat was fulfilled twice: at the exile and after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. The question arises: Were the sanctions more general than this? That is, was the command to worship God a cross-boundary law and therefore valid in the New Covenant? Yes, because the God of Old Covenant Israel is a universal God: the one and only true God. No other god may safely be worshipped.
When God ordered Israel to hear, He simultaneously ordered Israel to obey. The Christian community has ceased to hear or obey, except highly selectively. The churches' self-conscious rejection of God's Bible-revealed law, its mandated sanctions, and Christians' kingdom inheritance in history has undermined their assertion of God's absolute sovereignty (partial, says the Arminian) over history and the church's authority in history. A God who is not completely sovereign over history is not the Creator God of the Bible who providentially ordains everything that comes to pass. He does not issue announcements to pagan rulers as God did to King Cyrus:
Thus saith the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him; and I will loose the loins of kings, to open before him the two leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut; I will go before thee, and make the crooked places straight: I will break in pieces the gates of brass, and cut in sunder the bars of iron: And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the LORD, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel. For Jacob my servant's sake, and Israel mine elect, I have even called thee by thy name: I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known me. I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me: That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the LORD, and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things (Isa. 45:1-7).
A partially sovereign god cannot legitimately assert his authority in history. No wonder, then, that modern Christians are convinced that their partially sovereign God has not issued unique laws as tools of dominion, nor has He offered a world-conquering vision to His followers. A God who does not impose predictable corporate sanctions in history is in no position to guarantee his followers a visible kingdom in history as a reward for obeying His laws.
Footnotes:
1. "And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment" (Mark 12:30).
2. George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 187-89.
3. Ibid., pp. 37-38.
4. This is why a day care center can be such a profitable family-run business: most men refuse to do it. This reduces competition. Meanwhile, unmarried women seek out male role models for their young children.
5. Reasons offered for this change have been both social and genetic. Social arguments include these. First, there are more male teachers at the high school level, who regard spirited intellectual competition as manly. They reward boys' behavior: more aggressive, questioning. Second, girls who are equally competitive with boys tend to be regarded as masculine and perhaps a threat to male egos. Girls who want to be popular with boys tend to be quiet, refuse to ask questions, and play the feminine role: submissive. They fall behind academically, especially in math and science. Girls test at 50 points below boys on the Scholastic Achievement Test in math: 450 vs. 500 out of 800 maximum. Jane Gross, "To Help Girls Keep Up, Girls-Only Math Classes," New York Times (Nov. 20, 1993). Problem: the girls do not test lower than boys in the language arts. Are they more aggressive in language arts classes? This seems doubtful. Another explanation is genetic: girls think more abstractly than boys until puberty, when boys begin to catch up and then excel.
6. Internship is also a way to reward hospitals for cooperating in the restriction of the supply of physicians which state medical licensure necessarily entails. Hospitals receive the low-cost services of newly graduated physicians for several years. Reuben A. Kessel, "Price Discrimination in Medicine," Journal of Law and Economics, I (1958), pp. 29-32.
7. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 123-31.
8. Marsden, Soul of the American University, ch. 9.
9. R. J. Rushdoony, The Messianic Character of American Education: Studies in the History of the Philosophy of Education (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1963).
10. High school graduation, especially the prom, serves unofficially as a similar twentieth-century rite of passage in the United States. The most persuasive study of this topic is Jean Shepherd's hilarious short story, "Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories," in the book with the same title (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1976).
11. "Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all. But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal. For to one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom; to another the word of knowledge by the same Spirit; To another faith by the same Spirit; to another the gifts of healing by the same Spirit; To another the working of miracles; to another prophecy; to another discerning of spirits; to another divers kinds of tongues; to another the interpretation of tongues: But all these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will" (I Cor. 12:4-11).
12. Gary North, "Educational Vouchers: The Double Tax," The Freeman (May 1976); North, "Vouchers: Politically Correct Money," ibid. (June 1995).
13. Meredith G. Kline, "Comments on an Old-New Error," Westminster Theological Journal, XLI (Fall 1978), p. 184.
14. Cecil V. Currey, "The Franklin Legend," Journal of Christian Reconstruction, III (Summer 1976), p. 143.
15. The author of 1789, distributed by the John Birch Society. He later worked on the staff of a famous conservative U.S. Senator.
16. Currey, "Franklin Legend," p. 150. See also Currey, Code Number 72: Ben Franklin: Patriot or Spy? (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1972). His previous book on Franklin was Road to Revolution: Benjamin Franklin in England, 1765-1775 (Garden City, New York: Anchor, 1968). The earlier book was favorably received by historians. It was not controversial. It was not memorable. It was safe.
17. Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Fortress, [1974] 1981), I, p. 313.
18. See Appendix C, below: "Syncretism, Pluralism, and Empire."
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