The Two Most Important Books in My Life
Remnant Review
Two books shaped my thinking more than any others. I wrote three appendices for the first book: Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law (1973). I edited the second, and I rewrote paragraphs: Ray Sutton’s That You May Prosper (1987).
TURNING POINT #1
Had I not read the first one, I would not understand the biblical approach to casuistry: the lost art of applying biblical principles to real-world situations. For Protestants, casuistry ceased in the late 17th century. The last major Protestant book of casuistry was Richard Baxter’s A Christian Directory (1673), which was published exactly three centuries before Rushdoony’s book. But it was compromised. It was heavily dependent on a Protestant version of Greek rationalism. Rushdoony’s book was the first one that showed how much of the Mosaic law applies to social, economic, and political conditions and problems in New Testament times.
He did not have the idea of biblical law as the basis of casuistry when he began writing books. His first book, a book on the philosophy of Cornelius Van Til, appeared in 1959: By What Standard? In 1960, he then wrote a short summary of that book for the same publisher, Presbyterian and Reformed: Van Til. It is totally forgotten today. It had few sales then. His third book was the one I read in the spring of 1962 when I was at UCLA: Intellectual Schizophrenia. It is a critique of public education. I wrote him a lengthy letter, and he responded. I met him that summer at a two-week conference at St. Mary’s College. He hired me the next year as a summer intern with the newly formed Center for American Studies. I lived with his family that summer. I lived again with them the next summer. After that, they moved to Southern California.
Rushdoony’s thinking was shaped by his commitment to Van Til’s Bible-based defense of the faith. But he did not share Van Til’s Dutch Reformed amillennialism, which teaches that Christians will always be in a defensive minority condition. Rushdoony was a postmillennialist, which had been the common view of American Presbyterianism until after the Civil War. It teaches Christian victory in history before the Second Coming.
This left Rushdoony in a difficult intellectual position. Van Til was an intellectual revolutionary. He was the first Christian philosopher to deny the legitimacy of humanism as a support for Christian thought. That mistake in the apologetic tradition stretches all the way back to Justin Martyr in the second century A.D. His apologetic system had no content in the realm of social ethics. He undermined the philosophical foundations of Western social institutions and social theory, but he offered nothing to replace either the institutions or the social theory. I described this strategy in my book, Political Polytheism (1989), pages 131–32. He was like a Dutchman who recommended that the Dutch blow up all of the dikes, but then refused to offer any substitute way of keeping out the sea. That was no problem for Van Til. He was an amillennialist. He did not feel pressure to substitute Christian alternatives to the fading influence of Christianity in Western culture. He expected defeat.
This was Rushdoony’s dilemma. He believed in future Christian victory in society. His title for his first book revealed his dilemma: “By what standard?” On what basis should Christians seek to build the kingdom of God in history? Van Til offered no suggestion. Neither did Rushdoony until 1968. In that year, he began to preach a series of weekly sermons that became The Institutes of Biblical Law in 1973.
Prior to 1968, Rushdoony’s work was negative: a critique of humanism, especially in education and politics. In this sense, his work was an application of Van Til’s work, which was also exclusively negative: anti-Greek and anti-Kant.
This was also true of Karl Marx. His work was exclusively critical. I saw this clearly when I wrote Marx’s Religion of Revolution (1968). Marx offered no blueprint for the world of socialism and the final world of communism. He was almost silent on the transitional era of socialism, and he was completely silent on communism, the final stage of history.
The Institutes offered preliminary blueprints for replacement dikes. This is why the book was revolutionary. It completed Van Til’s work of demolition. Van Til would not admit this. He was aloof and silent on Rushdoony. Yet he recognized that Greg Bahnsen was the best possible person to replace him at Westminster Seminary in the department of apologetics. But Bahnsen by 1973 had adopted postmillennialism. By 1974, he was a theonomist. I remember the Chalcedon-sponsored seminar that Bahnsen attended, probably in 1969. He was not yet either theonomic or postmillennial. I think it was that seminar, at which I spoke and at which Rushdoony spoke, that changed his mind.
As a work of casuistry, The Institutes served as a beacon for my work in Christian economics. I recognized by the mid-1960's that I had to go to the Old Testament to make my case, but I had no apologetic strategy to justify this, i.e., no intellectual defense. There was no Protestant casuistry. Beginning in 1973, there was. My book, An Introduction to Christian Economics, was published that year.
Sutton’s book gave me the five-point covenant model. That model had been discovered in 1954 by a scholar named George Mendenhall, but I never read his scholarly article. It had been developed in 1963 by a professor at Westminster Seminary, Meredith Kline, in his short book, Treaty of the Great King, a commentary on Deuteronomy. I did not see at the time how Kline’s five points could structure systematic theology, let alone all of social theory, Christian and humanistic. Kline expressly denied that it could or should be used in the New Testament era. He was hostile to biblical law in general. He believed that the Mosaic law was part of a temporary judicial dispensation, which he called an intrusion. His position was inherently antinomian, so I did not see the implications of the five points: transcendence/presence, hierarchy/authority, ethics/law, oath/sanctions, and succession/time.
TURNING POINT #2
I had a major turning point in my life in late 1979. In the fall, I was given a professorship at Campbell College, which was an hour’s drive from Durham. It was an endowed chair. It was in the field of economics. There was no other college or university in the country that would have given me an endowed chair to teach economics. My degree was in history. I was assigned the task of teaching a one-semester course in free market economics. The course was required for graduation.
I had to teach only four classes a week: two 90-minute back-to-back classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I finished by noon. It took four hours for me to drive there each week. It paid a very good salary. It was very easy work. From age 16, I was good at lecturing. It was the ideal job for me. I don’t know if I would have moved to the little town of Buies Creek, but I might have. I would probably still be teaching there. But I decided to move. My newsletter business was taking off spectacularly, and I was tired of paying state income tax in North Carolina. I decided to move to Texas late in the year. Texas had no state income tax. We moved in the last week of December.
I doubt that I could have completed anything like the 31-volume economic commentary on the Bible that I finished a few weeks before my birthday in 2012, which was the cut-off date for the vow that I took before buying our house in Durham. I said that I would invest 10 hours a week, 50 weeks a year until my birthday in 2012. I did this. I finished my writing just a few weeks before. But I am almost certain that I would have been unable to construct anything resembling a systematic approach to Christian economics if I had not moved to Tyler in December 1979, and also if Sutton had not burned himself severely in 1985, forcing him to stay out of the pulpit for several months. That was when he wrote his book, which went through at least three re-writes, each one getting clearer. He had no concept of the five-point covenant structure when he began the book. That emerged only because I kept pressing him on clarifying issues. He did what I asked, and the result was what I regard as the most important theological book since Calvin’s Institutes.
Before Sutton’s book, my books were conceptually incomplete. An Introduction to Christian Economics, was published in the same year that The Institutes was published: 1973. It’s not a bad book. It surely is preliminary. I could have continued to produce books like it. My commentary on Genesis was written from 1973 to 1982. It does not show any signs of the five-point covenant model. It is a good book.
In 1980, I sat down for two weeks and wrote a book on an IBM Selectric III typewriter, Unconditional Surrender. It was the last book I ever wrote on a typewriter. I wrote it off the top of my head. I had no outline. I did this deliberately. I wanted the book to be easy to read. In the first edition, I used the first three points to structure the first three chapters: God, man, and law. I did not include a chapter on sanctions. I also did not have a chapter on time. I added the chapter on time in 1988. I added the section on sanctions in the final edition, which was published in 2011.
I have already mentioned my commentary on Genesis, published in 1982: Genesis: The Dominion Covenant. My 1985 book on the first 19 chapters of Exodus is Moses and Pharaoh.
It was only with my book on Exodus 20, meaning the Ten Commandments, did the covenant model begin to shake my thinking. I wrote The Sinai Strategy from 1985 to 1986. It reflects the five-point model. But I did not do this self-consciously. I was working with Sutton’s manuscript. I had developed a sense of the model. My book was structured as if I had fully understood Sutton’s model. I didn’t. I structured the Ten Commandments in terms of Sutton’s five-point covenant model: two five-point sections, each with the same five-point order. The first five commandments are priestly; the second five commandments are kingly. That only became clear to me when the book had already been typeset.
Amazingly, I had forgotten to write a Preface. I had included it in the Table of Contents, but I had forgotten to write it. This amazing oversight had not occurred to me until I was proofreading the typeset version in order to index it. So, I wrote it. There, I present the case for the five-point covenant model as the foundation of the Ten Commandments. I discussed this on the first page of the Preface.
Sutton had also missed this aspect of the Ten Commandments.
My life’s work would have been much more difficult and less systematic if I had not worked with Sutton in editing his book. If I had stayed in North Carolina, I do not think I would have made the discovery. If he had not been severely burned, he would not have taken the time off that he used to write his book. I do not think I would have seen that my book on the Ten Commandments was structured in terms of the five-point model. I would not have used the model to write the remaining 28 volumes.
I wrote a short book, God’s Covenants, in 2014. There, I present the five points. My major intellectual work in economics is the second edition of my book, The Covenantal Structure of Christian Economics, which I am indexing now. I also used the five-point structure to write the first volume of my four-volume series, Christian Economics. Volume 1 is the Student’s Edition. I wrote it in 2017, but the typeset and indexed edition appeared this year.
CONCLUSION
My economic thinking was shaped primarily by the writings of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. I read their major works in the summer of 1963 when I worked for the Center for American Studies. That was the most productive summer of reading in my life. I was paid to read, and I did a great deal of reading. I had already been influenced by articles by Mises, but not to the extent that I was after the summer of 1963. As important as Austrian economics has been in my thinking, my major contribution has not been in developing Austrian economics. It is been in developing Christian economics.
Had it not been for The Institutes, I would not have had full confidence in applying biblical law to economics. I had the general idea of doing this as early as 1963, when I lived with Rushdoony. But I would have struggled in justifying the application of biblical law to economic theory if I had not had The Institutes as the conceptual model for casuistry. My task would have been much more difficult without Sutton’s book. I have used the five-point covenant model as a kind of methodological cookie-cutter, and this has sped up my work considerably. It has given my work a coherence that it would otherwise have lacked.
Those two books have been fundamental in shaping my approach to interpreting the Bible and also in interpreting biblical economics. I think I am going to be able to leave a legacy that can be used by some bright budding economists around the world to write their own materials and produce their own online lectures. Potentially, Christians in foreign countries are without any kind of instruction in casuistry or in Christian economics. But because of my site’s free PDF editions of my books, intellectual leaders will be able to gain access to the framework that they need to begin to apply Christian economics in their own countries. That is my hope.