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ISRAEL'S SUPREME COURT If there arise a matter too hard for thee in judgment, between blood and blood, between plea and plea, and between stroke and stroke, being matters of controversy within thy gates: then shalt thou arise, and get thee up into the place which the LORD thy God shall choose; And thou shalt come unto the priests the Levites, and unto the judge that shall be in those days, and enquire; and they shall shew thee the sentence of judgment: And thou shalt do according to the sentence, which they of that place which the LORD shall choose shall shew thee; and thou shalt observe to do according to all that they inform thee: According to the sentence of the law which they shall teach thee, and according to the judgment which they shall tell thee, thou shalt do: thou shalt not decline from the sentence which they shall shew thee, to the right hand, nor to the left. And the man that will do presumptuously, and will not hearken unto the priest that standeth to minister there before the LORD thy God, or unto the judge, even that man shall die: and thou shalt put away the evil from Israel. And all the people shall hear, and fear, and do no more presumptuously (Deut. 17:8-13).
The theocentric focus of this law is God's office as a judge. God is the final Judge.(1) The settlement of disputes between men is to reflect the final settlement of disputes between God and man. In God's court, there will be a final settlement. Every case will be brought to a conclusion. There will be either reconciliation or permanent separation between the Judge and the judged. This aspect of this law was universal. The office of priest -- he who offers sacrifices as man's representative -- ended in A.D. 70.(2) The question is: Has the ecclesiastical minister replaced the priest? Does the church still possess authority in supplying representatives who hand down civil judgments? This is the crucial covenantal question that this chapter must answer. If the answer is yes, then the absolute judicial separation of church and State is a false Enlightenment myth.
God's authority on the throne of judgment is unitary in the sense of His unified being (Deut. 6:4). Yet this authority is also plural: "let us" (Gen. 1:26; 11:7). God's court reflects God's being: both one and many. A human court is not God's heavenly court, yet it must reflect the one and the many of God's heavenly court. The unity of the one and the many cannot be achieved through ontology: unified being. It must therefore be achieved subordinately, i.e., representatively. This is why, in Israel's supreme court, both church and State were represented. Israel's voice of civil authority at the highest level was not legitimate if it was restricted to civil magistrates.
A Question of Jurisdiction No social order can survive without civil sanctions. Under the biblical civil covenant, these sanctions are exclusively negative. The State is not a supplier of positive sanctions except in its capacity as the judge of those who have committed crimes whose proper sanction is restitution. The state then transfers wealth from the criminal to the victim. But the State is not the source of the positive sanctions showered on the victim; it is only the arbitrator. It compels the covenant-breaker to return to the victim that which lawfully belongs to the victim, including compensation for his suffering and the statistical risk he bore of not discovering who had committed the crime.(3) Normally, this requires double restitution (Ex. 22:4). In short, the State is the lawful enforcer. It possesses a God-given, covenantal monopoly of violence in order to enforce justice (Rom. 13:1-8).
In Deuteronomy 17:8-13, Moses presented a case law application of the general principle of the hierarchy of covenantal judgment. In Exodus 18, he set up a system of appeals courts. Here he made an application of the general law of appeals. Two men have come into a local court. They are equals in influence. This makes the case too difficult for a local court to judge. "If there arise a matter too hard for thee in judgment, between blood and blood, between plea and plea, and between stroke and stroke, being matters of controversy within thy gates: then shalt thou arise, and get thee up into the place which the LORD thy God shall choose" (v. 8). The case was to be transferred to a higher court in which the judges were not part of the local community. In modern law, this is called a change of venue. The Mosaic law acknowledged that in difficult cases between prominent persons, each with his own supporters, each with a strong case, local judges may not qualified to render judgment. The cases are too hard. This is the language of Exodus 18: "And they judged the people at all seasons: the hard causes they brought unto Moses, but every small matter they judged themselves" (v. 26).
The mandated solution was to assemble a group of judges, civil and ecclesiastical, to consider the case. There is no question that Moses was here describing a civil dispute. The mandatory sanction for disobedience to the supreme court was execution. The church in Israel did not possess the power of the sword except in defending against trespassers of the boundaries around the tabernacle (Num. 18:3, 22). All of Deuteronomy 17 deals with civil law, but ecclesiastical judges played a role in the legal process.
This court's decision was final. It had to be obeyed. Nevertheless, there is no indication that the case in question had been a matter of capital sanctions prior to the court's final judgment. But once this court had declared final judgment, both participants had to obey. The person who was declared guilty had to follow the directive of the court. He was not executed, which means that this was not a capital infraction. But contumacy -- presumptive resistance to the supreme court -- was a capital offense.
This indicates that the supreme court's word was judicially representative of God's word. Its word was final in history. But this word was not exclusively civil or ecclesiastical. It was both. The judge, as a representative of the civil covenant, declared his judgment only in association with the priests. There had to be a united declaration. This kept the State from becoming judicially autonomous. Similarly with the church: the priests had no lawful way to enforce their judgment physically without the cooperation of the civil magistrate. Autonomy was not a legitimate option at the highest judicial level.
This joint declaration of judgment was analogous to a joint declaration of war. The two silver trumpets had to be blown by the Aaronic priests before the princes could lead the nation into battle. One trumpet was blown initially to assemble the princes. The text does not say that the priests blew this trumpet. But not until both were blown by the priests was the princes' decision to go into battle ratified (Num. 10:1-9).(4) The sanction of final judgment against Israel's enemies had to be consented to by both church and State.
Any party in the civil dispute who rebelled against the terms of the joint declaration faced death. What had been a matter to be solved by economic restitution now moved to a new level of criminality. It moved from restitution through money to restitution through execution. The resisting party was to be delivered into God's heavenly court for final sentencing. Certain acts demand that the convicted criminal be transferred to God's court. One of these acts was resistance to a final determination by Israel's supreme court.
The cost of law enforcement in this case was borne by the civil government. The civil government had a cost-effective means of reducing resistance to its official decisions: the threat of execution. The resisting party had considerable incentive to count the cost of his non-compliance. This cost was very high: his permanent removal from the jurisdiction of any man's court.
The formal declaration by the supreme court moved the dispute from man's word to God's word. The person who resisted coming to terms with his opponent prior to the supreme court's declaration could say to himself: "I'm not going to comply. I don't have to comply." But the word to which he had not had to comply was the word of another individual. There had not yet been a covenantal declaration. But after the court made its final judgment, the threat of the most permanent civil sanction was inserted into the actor's cost-benefit analysis. He was no longer facing man's word; he was facing God's. He was therefore no longer facing an individual's sanctions, such as the other party's refusal to trade with him in the future. The negative sanction had moved from economics to life itself.
An Increase in Predictability Whenever this sanction was consistently imposed within the boundaries of Israel, the Israelites would have found that their lives had become more predictable. The law would have been taken seriously by everyone. An execution or two every few years would have sent a very clear message to all Israel regarding the costs of resistance to the law. This was the intent of this law: "And all the people shall hear, and fear, and do no more presumptuously" (v. 13).
When large numbers of people fear the civil law, their actions become more predictable whenever the courts are predictable. The law becomes more predictable when the courts become more predictable. An increase in the predictability of the law reduces the costs of decision-making. People know generally what the law requires. They also know that the judges will impose the specified sanctions attached to the law. The last remaining element of uncertainty is the reaction of the guilty party. Will he comply with the court's declaration? This case law made it clear: God expected the guilty party to comply. God expected the State to see to it that the guilty party complied. The person who refused to comply with the court's declaration would not get another opportunity to break any law.
Israel's solution to the settlement of private disputes was very different from Athens' solution. In private disputes, the Athenian court did not enforce its judgments unless there was a matter of State concern involved. The matter was turned over to the victorious party for enforcement.(5) Justice was available only to families strong enough to enforce the court's decision.
Costs of Production
With greater legal predictability, society reduces its costs of production. When men know what the law requires, and when they know that convicted law-breakers in the society have great incentive to comply, they can more easily predict the actions of others. This increases the predictability of other decision-makers in society. This in turn decreases the cost of cooperation. One of the most familiar laws of economics is this: when the cost of production of something is reduced, more of it will be supplied. Producers see an opportunity to make a profit: by increasing production, they can take advantage of the newly discovered difference between production costs and consumer prices. Therefore, by reducing the cost of predicting other people's actions, this Mosaic law, including its specified capital sanction, would have tended to increase the division of labor in Israelite society. This would have increased the wealth of those living under its jurisdiction. By reducing the likelihood that others would refuse to comply with the law, this law increased the likelihood that men would honor their promises. This would also have increased the value of contracts. A contract is an agreement that increases the predictability of other people's actions in the future. The greater the expected value of a contract, the more people who would seek out others to deal with.
This leads to a very important principle of Christian economics: predictable covenantal law and covenantal sanctions undergird the humanly unplanned development of a contractual society. The covenantal basis of contract law is manifested in this case law. The threat of execution for non-compliance with the State's interpretation of what a contract requires increases the likelihood that men will take care in drafting their contracts and complying with their terms.
There is nothing in the New Covenant that annuls this principle of civil court authority. There is no New Covenant principle that authorizes reduced civil sanctions for non-compliance with the supreme court's decision. There is nothing that changes the specified sanction. In fact, the severity of the specified sanction -- the change in venue -- is what demonstrates the supreme authority of the court. To reduce the sanction is to undermine the authority of the supreme court. Any argument on the part of non-theonomists that the New Covenant has nothing to say about such matters is implicitly an undermining of civil authority and a subsidy to criminals. In any case, if the New Covenant really has nothing to say about such judicial matters, then the consistent New Covenant theologian should excuse himself from the discussion. He has nothing to say, for the New Covenant supposedly has nothing to say. On the whole, Christians in the West have willingly excused themselves from such discussions since about 1700, which is why social theory, criminal law, and politics have become battlegrounds between left-wing Enlightenment humanists and right-wing Enlightenment humanists.
Why this silence by Christians? Perhaps because they have recognized the underlying theocratic nature of this law, and all civil law. This Mosaic law had an important qualification: Israel's supreme civil court was neither wholly civil nor wholly ecclesiastical. The supreme court's authority to enforce its word was legitimate only because this decision of the civil judge came only after consultation with, and the support of, the priests.
The Priests the Levites The phrase in verse 9, "the priests the Levites," first appears in the Bible in this verse. If we are to understand the scope of this law, we must understand the meaning of this phrase. In Deuteronomy 18, we are given a clearer picture of who these priests-Levites were. They were those Levites who served as tabernacle-temple priests. They had to reside in the city where the tabernacle was located. They were not Levites who lived in local communities. The priests officiated at the sacrifices (Deut. 18:1-8). This meant that these priests held sacramental offices. They were ordained to special ministerial office, which required them to be present at the altar. In some cases, they actually sold their real estate in their home cities: "They shall have like portions to eat, beside that which cometh of the sale of his patrimony" (Deut. 18:8).
The presence of priests on the nation's supreme civil court gave veto power to the church. The supreme representative function of the supreme court could not lawfully be exclusively civil. The civil oath did not authorize exclusive judicial authority at the highest level, i.e., the final court of appeal. This balance of authority served as a check on the State. The State's agents could not unilaterally declare God's law in the most difficult cases that divided men.
Separation and Inheritance The permanent separation of covenant-breakers and God at the final judgment leads to a transfer of inheritance: from the guilty parties to the innocent victims. The New Heaven and New Earth in its post-final judgment, consummated form will be inhabited solely by covenant-keepers (Rev. 21:1-4; 7-8). This model of final inheritance/disinheritance is the judicial basis of the prophecy that the righteous will inherit the earth in history. "For evildoers shall be cut off: but those that wait upon the LORD, they shall inherit the earth. For yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be: yea, thou shalt diligently consider his place, and it shall not be. But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace" (Ps. 37:9-11). That which will surely take place in history will reflect the final outcome in eternity.
The postmillennial implications of these passages is obvious. Amillennialism's theory of history as a permanent stalemate between covenant-breakers and covenant-keepers, with the church in permanent remnant status, or the church as progressively under oppression,(6) is contradicted by Isaiah's prophecy concerning the historical manifestation of the New Heaven and New Earth, in which, unlike the scene in Revelation 21:4, death will still exist. Isaiah 65:17-23 presents a promise of permanent inheritance, in which righteousness is the basis of inheritance, and therefore disinheritance by covenant-breakers is no longer a threat.
The progressive transfer of inheritance in history will resemble Egypt's transfer of wealth to the Israelites at the exodus. The inheritance of the Egyptians' firstborn sons was transferred to God's firstborn son, Israel. This is normative for history. So far, it has not been normal because of the repeated apostasy of the church, but that which has been normal in the past is not that which is normative. It is also not a permanent condition.
There were a few cases under the Old Covenant in which there was no inheritance by Israel, where disinheritance was absolute. God imposed total destruction on a few cities. Sodom and Gomorrah are the archetypes. Lot did not inherit the wealth of Sodom. Arad's cities were totally destroyed by Israel (Num. 21:3). Jericho was totally destroyed (Josh. 6:24). Saul lost his kingship because he refused to destroy Amalek totally (I Sam. 15:35; 16:1). But in the vast majority of cases in the conquest of Canaan, Israel inherited the capital assets of the defeated nations. This was part of God's original plan of inheritance: it was to be achieved through the disinheritance of covenant-breakers. "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. . ." (Deut. 6:10-11). Solomon later summarized this process: "A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children's children: and the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just" (Prov. 13:22).
New Testament Applications The New Testament equivalent of the priest-Levite is the ordained church officer who has the right to administer the sacraments and to restrict unauthorized people's access to the sacraments. This officer holds the keys to the kingdom (Matt. 16:19). He has the authority to declare people excommunicate. That is, he lawfully can exercise judgment with respect to a man's eternal inheritance. To the extent that inheritance in history is correlative to inheritance in eternity, he possesses the right indirectly to determine inheritance in history.
The biblical covenant makes it clear that the righteous will inherit in history. This historical outcome is denied by pessimillennialists. This is another reason why point five -- eschatology -- influences point four: sanctions. It also influences point two: hierarchy. This is why the modern Christian is not really neutral regarding the continuing authority of Mosaic law. He does not really believe that the New Testament has nothing to say about this, despite his initial assurances to the contrary. He insists that the New Testament has abolished all traces of the Mosaic civil law, or at least all those traces that call into question the Enlightenment's theory of religiously neutral civil law and political pluralism, which he devoutly accepts. He rejects point five of the biblical covenant, and therefore he rejects points two and four: the suggestion that a minister of the sacraments has any lawful advisory and veto function in a civil court. He sides with the humanists in a joint effort to deny that the church has any legitimate official authority in civil judgments. Prior to 1650, such a joint declaration would have been considered unthinkable in the West outside of the tiny New England commonwealth of Rhode Island.
Creeds and Confessions
The most important church council in history was the Council of Nicea, held in 325. It settled for all time the question of the divinity of Jesus Christ. To deny Christ's equality with God is to deny the Christian faith. The church has accepted this declaration ever since. Yet this international ecclesiastical assembly was called to serve by the Emperor Constantine, who wanted this issue settled. It got settled theologically at the Council of Nicea, although it was not settled militarily and socially for several centuries.(7)
The Westminster Assembly first met on July 1, 1643. The British Parliament had called for its creation the previous November. Parliament, not the Anglican Church, chose the Assembly's representatives. The Westminster "divines" were in fact political appointees. The Assembly was advisory to the Parliament. The members were paid by Parliament to attend.(8) The Westminster Assembly ratified this political decision by putting the following declaration into the Confession: the civil magistrate "hath power to call synods, to be present at them, and to provide that whatsoever is transacted in them be according to the mind of God."(9) This passage was removed by the American Presbyterian Church in the revision of 1787-88, at the same time that the U.S. Constitution was being ratified. The Whig view of the separation of church and State was ratified in both constitutional documents: by the removal of a section in the ecclesiastical covenant, and by the inclusion in the civil covenant of a prohibition against religious test oaths for Federal office-holding.(10)
The Protestant Solution: Abdication
The modern Protestant is a child of the Enlightenment in his political outlook. The political religious pluralism which was regarded as heretical by the church, East and West, for 1700 years is today universally accepted by Protestants as somehow innately Christian and, in the words of unitarian skeptic Thomas Jefferson, "self-evident." The modern secular State has issued its declaration of independence from God, and American Protestants have not only agreed, they have hailed this as the very work of God in history, their source of liberation. No one has put it any more starkly than the former Presidential aide(11) and convicted felon (pre-conversion) Charles Colson: "Thus two typically mortal enemies, the Enlightenment and the Christian faith, found a patch of common ground on American soil."(12) He regards this as a great breakthrough in civic freedom. As one of modern American evangelicalism's most respected figures, Colson's opinion is representative.
In the best-selling popular history of colonial America, The Light and the Glory, the two Protestant authors speak of "the divine origin of its [the Constitution's] inspiration. . . ."(13) Furthermore, "it is nothing less than the institutional guardian of the Covenant Way of life for the nation as a whole!"(14) Yet they recognize that it is "a secularizing of the spiritual reality of the covenant. It can thus never be the substitute for a covenant life totally given to the Lord Jesus Christ."(15) This should be obvious to any Christian. But the statement is also covenantally incomplete. The crucial question is this: What is the New Covenant basis of the civil covenant in "a covenant life totally given to Jesus Christ"? The two authors did not raise this question, for the question no longer occurs to modern American Christians, even among those few who have heard the word "covenant." Yet the father of one of the authors served as Chaplain of the U.S. Senate for years, and later became the posthumous subject of a best-selling book and a Hollywood movie.(16) The "covenant life totally given to Jesus Christ" is arbitrarily confined to three spheres: personal, ecclesiastical, and familial. Without any supporting exegesis of the Bible, American Protestants for over two centuries have assumed that the civil covenant has no legal connection to Christ, and should not.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court has outlawed public prayer in government-funded schools (1963), as well as the teaching of creation in these schools (1991). It has legalized abortion on demand in the name of a woman's right to privacy (1973). Christian political activists who oppose all three decisions seem to think that these decisions were in no way connected to the U.S. Constitution's declaration of covenantal independence from God and the church in 1788. The secularization of the Supreme Court, they believe, has nothing to do with the actual wording of the Constitution. Christian activists today suffer from near-terminal naiveté.
One price of Protestantism has been the acceptance of the Enlightenment's doctrine of pluralism. Roman Catholicism laid the foundations for this capitulation by its acceptance of Stoic natural law theory by way of Aristotle. Scholasticism's acceptance of Aristotelian logic set the precedent. The Reformers offered no substitute, and by the mid-seventeenth century, late-medieval scholastic categories of politics were imported into the Presbyterian tradition. The footnotes in Samuel Rutherford's Lex, Rex (1644) are filled with references to members of the Dominicans' school of Salamanca. These men were brilliant jurists, as well as economists who pioneered concepts of free pricing, monetary theory, and interest as a time-based phenomenon that were in some ways superior to Adam Smith's theories over two centuries later.(17)
In the same year that Lex, Rex was published, Roger Williams' Bloudy Tenant of Persecution appeared. His defense of religiously neutral civil government so appalled Parliament that they ordered all copies burned. It was based on natural law theory. But before the book appeared, Williams had secured a Parliamentary charter for Rhode Island that allowed him to conduct an experiment in his theory of neutral civil government.(18) That "lively experiment" in polity a century and a half later conquered the colonial American mind.
Without a State church, early modern era Protestants saw no way to secure a voice in civil affairs that Christian political theory had demanded for seventeen centuries. The rise of Oliver Cromwell in 1644 as the military master led to the extension of liberty of worship to all Protestant sects. The Independents would not tolerate an intolerant State church. Scottish Presbyterianism's attempt to secure such a monopoly(19) was anathema to them. Cromwell's victory made impossible the Presbyterians' demand for a State church. The restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660 did not reverse this toleration, although the King imposed the Act of Uniformity in 1662 which led to the departure of 2,000 Puritan ministers from their pulpits.
Who should represent the church in the civil courts? This question has had no answer in Protestant nations since the late seventeenth century. Which ministers should be eligible? Which groups calling themselves churches should be eligible? This was no problem for Mosaic Israel, although it had become a problem by Ahab's day. Mosaic Israel had only one priesthood.
This answer -- ministers of churches that affirm an historic Trinitarian creed -- was too narrow for Enlightenment humanists and Protestant Independents, and too broad for the Presbyterians. The Protestants have been deadlocked since the seventeenth century. The result has been the progressive secularization of the United States' civil order: from Scholastic natural law theory to Newtonian natural law theory to Madison's grand experiment: a Constitution stripped of any theory of law. In the opinion of the Framers, the preservation of liberty is a matter of technique rather than ethics: designing proper institutional checks and balances in the allocation of political power. But these checks and balances have steadily fallen prey to the sovereignty of the Supreme Court, which the Constitution's authors regarded as the least powerful branch of the Federal government, but which has become the most powerful. The Supreme Court renders final judgment -- point four -- on the legality of what the other two branches do. The Court therefore has become the voice of authority: point two.(20)
In Mosaic Israel, the supreme court could not represent one covenant; it had to represent two: church and State. This is the system of checks and balance announced by God through Moses, but modern man, both Christian and non-Christian, regards the Mosaic judicial settlement as a source of tyranny. Judicial checks and balances are seen today exclusively as intra-civil government matters -- federal, state, and local -- but never as matters of inter-government relations, i.e., civil and ecclesiastical.
A Royal Priesthood
The New Covenant, like the Old Covenant, rests on an oath of loyalty: allegiance to God. There are four areas where this covenant oath seals a legal bond: personal, ecclesiastical, familial, and civil. The modern Christian generally acknowledges the legitimacy of the first three covenantal Trinitarian oaths, but as a loyal son of the Enlightenment, he denies the fourth.
If the fourth covenant were honored, this principle would become a judicial reality: he who is not sealed by covenant oath (point four) may not lawfully exercise covenantal authority (point two) by invoking and applying covenant sanctions (point four). To declare covenant sanctions is to affect the inheritance (point five) in God's name (point one). Only those who are under the covenant through an oath possess this authority. The political question becomes: Whose covenant, whose oath?
To gain the eternal blessings of God, a person must swear a covenant oath to the God of the Bible, whose Son and Messiah is Jesus Christ. To gain the blessings of the sacraments, a person must come under the authority of the institutional church. To gain the blessings of a Christian marriage, a person must have sworn oaths one and two. So also with biblical citizenship. But this is denied by most Christians today.
Biblical citizenship, above all, is the authority to become a judge, either through membership in the military or as a judge. A judge includes the office of voter and the office of juror. He who is not a citizen may not vote or serve on a jury. If he has not sworn a loyalty oath to the State, he is not a citizen. If he has not also sworn the first two oaths -- personal and ecclesiastical -- he is not to become a citizen in a biblical commonwealth. The Enlightenment attacked this doctrine of oath-bound Christian citizenship. Humanists sought the legal authority to impose civil sanctions on Christians in the name of another God: autonomous man. They did not wish to live inside the boundaries of God's Bible-revealed law. So, they created a theory of political citizenship which invokes a loyalty oath only to the State -- a State devoid of any Trinitarian demarcation. Their theory of citizenship is today universally accepted by Protestantism and American Catholicism.
The connection between the Mosaic Covenant's theory of priestly participation in the supreme court and the modern Supreme Court is this: there must be representatives of Trinitarian churches on the nation's supreme civil court. But what about local courts? There was no requirement that local civil courts include Levites or priests. The Mosaic priests were centrally located. The place of sacrifice became their temporary home. This is no longer the case. There is no central place of sacrifice. But there is a central place where the supreme civil court meets. This is in part a matter of technology, at least for now, but it is also a matter of personalism. There is more to courts than the formal gatherings of court's judges. There are personal relationships among the judges.
The New Testament covenant oath is priestly. The promise of Exodus 19:6 has been fulfilled:
And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation (Ex. 19:6a).
But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light: Which in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God: which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy (I Pet. 2:9-10).
Peter's language is important for political theory. The New Covenant priestly status is royal, i.e., kingly. The Protestant Reformation's doctrine of "every man a priest," i.e., every redeemed person a priest, is an extension of part of Peter's declaration. But the Reformation did not affirm the parallel doctrine: every redeemed person a king.(21)This was a major theological and social omission. This political principle implies universal civil suffrage among adult church members. Tentative beginnings of this doctrine arose only in the next century, particularly during the English Civil War (1642-49). The sect known as the Levellers wanted to extend the vote to all male rate-payers in church or State.(22)
The covenantal basis of both doctrines was announced by Peter: every redeemed, covenantally bound person is both a priest and a king. This does not deny the fact that there are still ordained officers in church and State who exercise greater authority than those whom they represent. Hierarchy is an inescapable aspect of the covenant. So is ordination. But the concept of the priestly-kingly believer in Christ leads to the concept of covenant ratification in both spheres: church and State. Members of churches and citizens of states lawfully possess the veto. On regular occasions, a majority of them must be allowed to extend positive sanctions to one representative, thereby imposing negative sanctions on his rivals. The bottom-up authority of the covenant matches its top-down authority. Without the imposition of covenant sanctions, there can be no covenantal representation. Ordained representatives must truly represent both parties to the covenant: God and man. Both God and man must authorize an office-holders' continuing possession of authority. Officers of both church and State must be held responsible by those whom they represent. God holds the people responsible for the sins of their representatives (Lev. 4).(23) How, then, are the people to sanction this representation? Democratic politics is a consistent application of Peter's announcement. The question then becomes: Who has lawful access to the exercise of the vote? The New Covenant's answer is this: "Those who are under oath-bound covenantal sanctions to the Trinitarian God of the Bible in both church and State."
The priesthood of all believers secures the priestly status of every jury and every court whose members are all members in good standing of Trinitarian churches. Then why doesn't this principle of the universal priesthood solve the judicial problem of church-State relations at the level of the supreme court? Why is there still a necessity of a mixed court containing judges and sacramental officers? Because of the principle of checks and balances. There must be a division of authority. In every supreme court that lawfully imposes physical sanctions, there must be representation of the church. Someone who has the right to declare a person excommunicate must have a veto power on every supreme civil court. The civil authority must not assert its own exclusive counsel at the highest level. The checks and balances necessary to restrict civil government from becoming tyrannical must include a veto in the possession of sacramental officers. This is the message of Deuteronomy 17:8-12.
Conclusion Israel's supreme civil court was to include representatives of two covenants: civil and ecclesiastical. This law authorized the priests to veto the decision of a judge. The law speaks of a joint declaration: "According to the sentence of the law which they shall teach thee, and according to the judgment which they shall tell thee, thou shalt do." This law brought the power of the civil government in support of contracts. The threat of execution for one's refusal to adhere to the court's declaration placed the rebel under severe pressure to conform. This would have increased the predictability of the marketplace. Disputes over the interpretation of contracts would have ended with the supreme court's judgment.
Footnotes:
1. The final negative sanction is eternal death (Rev. 20:14-15).
2. This, of course, is a Protestant interpretation of the office.
3. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 511-19.
4. Gary North, Sanctions and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Numbers (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1996), p. 29.
5. G. Glotz, The Greek City and its Institutions (New York: Barnes & Noble, [1929] 1969), p. 249.
6. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 76-94.
7. The invading Ostrogoths were Arians.
8. Gary North, Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1996), Appendix C.
9. Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), XXII:3.
10. Article VI, Section III. See Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), pp. 385-91.
11. Under Richard Nixon.
12. Charles Colson, Kingdoms in Conflict (1987), p. 119. This book was jointly published by William Morrow, a secular publishing firm, and Zondervan Publishing House, a fundamentalist publishing firm.
13. Peter Marshall and David Manuel, The Light and the Glory (Old Tappan, New Jersey: Revell, 1977), pp. 343-44.
14. Ibid., p. 348.
15. Idem.
16. Catherine Marshall, A Man Called Peter: The Story of Peter Marshall (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951).
17. Murray N. Rothbard, Economic Thought before Adam Smith: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (Brookfield, Vermont: Elgar, 1985), ch. 4.
18. Edwin Scott Gaustad, Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in America (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1991), p. 85.
19. See Jane Lane, The Reign of King Covenant (London: Robert Hale, 1956).
20. North, Political Polytheism, ch. 10.
21. Huey P. Long, the corrupt populist governor from the poverty-stricken southern state of Louisiana during the 1920's and 1930's, made "every man a king" his slogan. As a U.S. Senator, he became a national figure during the Great Depression in the mid-1930's. He was considered a potentially significant political threat to President Franklin Roosevelt. He was assassinated in 1935.
22. William Haller, Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), p. 325. "Levelling" did not refer to property ownership. It referred to right to vote. The Diggers and the Fifth Monarchy men were the communists of the English Civil War era.
23. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 4.
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