Petr
12-12-2005, 02:46 AM
Perceptive stuff on important issues, IMO.
(Notice how anarchist Bakunin used materialistic determinism in favor of his doctrine of absolute freedom - "The negation of free will and the right of society to punish")
From R.J. Rushdoony's The Institutes of Biblical Law, pp. 499-500, 502-504:
12. Eminent Domain
Eminent domain is the claim to sovereignty by the state over all the property within the state, and it is the assertion of the right to appropriate all or any part thereof to any public or state use deemed necessary by the state. Compensation for the appropriated property is normally given, but it is not regarded as a binding limitation on the state.
...
Eminent domain is an assertion of sovereignty, and in Scripture is ascribed to God alone. ... This fact of God's eminent domain is celebrated in Scripture as the ground for the confidence of His people (Ps. 24:1, 50:12, I Cor. 10:26, 28, etc.) The eminent domain of the state was not recognized in Israel, as the incident of Naboth's vineyard makes clear (I Kings 20), although it is prophesied as one of the consequences of of apostasy from God the King (I Sam. 8:14). It is specifically forbidden in Ezekiel 46:18.
...
In terms of this claim to sovereignty and and to eminent domain, no constitution and no law has validity, in that all legislation can be set aside by means of an assertion of a prior sovereign power of the state. No legislation can give citizens any immunity against the state wherein the courts maintain the doctrine of eminent domain, whereby every law is subject to rejection wherever the sovereign power of the state so decrees.
Quite logically, the federal income tax legislation calls what the taxpayer is allowed to keep an "exemption" by the state, i.e., an act of grace. All a man's property and income, his artistic and commercial products, are, in terms of this claim to sovereignty and eminent domain, the property of the state, or at least under the control and use of the state.
Only as the sovereign power and saving grace of the triune God are asserted and accepted can the claims of the state to be the source of sovereignty and grace be undercut and nullified.
...
Not surprisingly, the assertion of the sovereignty of the state, a humanistic concept, led in the 18th and 19th centuries to a counter-assertion, the sovereignty of the individual, again a humanistic principle.
For Bakunin, the state was a sham god to be destroyed. Bakunin's trust was in natural law, and he held that natural law knows no state or any theory of state, but only man. "Man can never be altogether free in relation to natural and social laws." Freedom does not consist in revolting against all laws; "in so far as laws are natural, economic, and social laws, not authoritatively imposed but inherent in things," they are to be obeyed, said Bakunin. "If they are political and juridical laws, imposed by men upon men," whether by force, deceit, or universal suffrage, they are not to be obeyed.
"Man Cannot Revolt Against Nor Escape from Nature. Against the laws of Nature no revolt is possible on the part of man, the simple reason being that he himself is a product of Nature and that he exists only by virtue of those laws. A rebellion on his part would be ... a ridiculous attempt, it would be a revolt against himself, a suicide. And when man has a determination to destroy himself, or even when he carries out such a design, he acts in accordance with those same natural laws, from which nothing can exempt him: neither thought, nor will, nor despair nor any other passion, nor life, nor death.
"Man himself is nothing but Nature. His most sublime or most monstrous sentiments, the most perverted, the most egoistic, or the most heroic resolves or manifestations of his will, his most abstract, most theological or most insane thoughts - all that is nothing else but Nature. Nature enevelopes, permeates, constitutes his whole existence. How can he ever escape this Nature? (5)
If man is "nothing but Nature," then man's every impulse has the status of sovereign will. As against the sovereignty of the state and its right of eminent domain, anarchism holds to the sovereignty of the individual and the individual's right of eminent domain.
Accordingly, Bakunin called for "The negation of God and and the principle of authority, divine, and human, and also of any tutelage by a man over men," and for "The negation of free will and the right of society to punish - since every human individual, with no exception whatever, is but an involuntary product of natural and social environment." (6) Because "man is a social animal," man is truly man only in society; therefore, "Social solidarity is the first human law; freedom is the second law." (7) How can man live in society, when every man is his own law? For Bakunin, nature being absolute, the natural order is of necessity the good and true order. It follows, then, that
"VIII. The primitive, natural man becomes a free man, becomes humanized, a free and moral agent; in other words, he becomes aware of his humanity and realizes within himself and for himself his own human aspect and the rights of his fellow-beings. Consequently man should wish the freedom, morality and humanity of all men in the interest of his own humanity, his own morality and his personal freedom.
"IX. Thus respect for the freedom of others is the highest duty of man. To love this freedom and serve it - such is the only virtue. That is the basis of all morality; and there can be no other. (8)
(Citations from Bakunin: G.P. Maximoff, editor: The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism (New York; The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964)
If nature is the ultimate order, then Nature must also be the source of true order. Bakunin's logic is sound, however false his premises. If the state is the true manifestation of natural law, then the state is that area where man will realize true life and true morality. If the individual is this true expression of Nature and of natural law, then the anarchism of the individual, and a society of anarchism, represents the true order. Anarchism and statism thus have been two rival humanistic claimants to the right to represent the natural law and to claim eminent domains.
...
As against the natural law philosophies, Biblical law declares the sovereignty of the triune God and His sole right to eminent domain. All property is held in trust under and in stewardship to God the King. No institution can exercise any prerogative of God unless specifically delegated to do so, within the specified area of God's law. The state thus is the ministry of justice, not the original property owner or the sovereign lord of the land. Accordingly, the state has no right to eminent domain.
The chronic humanistic quarrel between statism and anarchism cannot be resolved except by the rejection of both alternatives in favor of the triune God and His supernatural law.
Pp. 773-6:
8. Power and Authority
St. Paul, in reminding the Corinthian Christians of their destiny, said, "Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world?" (I Cor. 6:2). Moffatt renders this, "Do you not know that the saints are to manage the world?," a meaning we need to remind ourselves of. Church government is a prelude to world government, not by the church but by "the saints."
...
Let us now turn to Homer's Odyssey. Odysseus returns home after many years of wandering. During that time, it had not occurred to him that chastity migt be required of him, although he expected it of his wife and slave girls. The suitors of his wife - for Odysseus was presumed dead - raped some of these slave girls. Odysseus himself acknowledged this: "Ye dogs, ye said in your hearts that I should never more come home from the land of the Trojans, in that ye wasted my house, and lay with the maidservants by force, and traitorously wooed my wife while I was yet alive." The nurse Eurycleia said that twelve of his fifty slave-girls were involved: "Of these twelve in all have gone the way of shame, and honour not me, nor their lady Penelope." After killing the suitors, Odysseus and his son Telemachus, and others, turned to the girls, to execute them. Telemachus hung all twelve on one cable. The reason for the execution was stated by Telemachus: "These ... have poured dishonour on my head and on my mother, and and have lain with the wooers."
(Odyssey citations from S.K. Butcher and Andrew Lang translation)
The offense of the girls was not against God: it was against Odysseus and Telemachus. The involvement of these girls with the men who had raped them, or perhaps seduced them, was not as important as the "dishonour" felt by Odysseus and Telemachus. Law for them had no higher reach than themselves. "The girls were property. The disposal of property was then, as now, a matter of expediency, not of right and wrong." (2)
The same was true in early Rome. The father had power over his children: they were property. Law did not transcend man, and it was essentially limited to the family of man. Subsequently, the state took over family's powers and made itself the father of its people and the source of law.
In either case, law was essentially humanistic and man-centered. Since man as family head or man as statist leader issued the law, the law was total. This appeared very clearly in Plato's Laws:
"The principal thing is that none, man or woman, should ever be without an officer set over him, and that none should get the mental habit of taking any step, whether in earnest or in jest, on his individual responsibility ... in a word, we must train the mind not even to consider acting as an individual or know how to do it (3)
...
Anarchism or totalitarianism, these are the alternatives. Either people, after Plato's hope, who do "not even ... consider acting as an individual or know how to do it," or individuals who are an absolute law unto themselves - these are the alternatives humanism offers to man.
But the saints are to govern the world in terms of God's law, which means that they must know the law. Thus, a basic requirement of healthy church life is a constant study of God' law, its implications and its applications.
The question of authority is inseparable from law in any Biblical sense. A primary meaning of authority is, "The right to command and to enforce obedience; the right to act officially." The origin of authority is a Latin word, augeo, increase. Authority has a natural increase to it. True authority prospers and abounds. Power and authority are not identical words. Power is strength or force; power can and often does exist without authority. The power of Odysseus and Telemachus and the powers of the Roman Empire, were real powers, but, in terms of God's law, they lacked authority, although they did had a formal authority merely as legitimate governments in their societies. As Denis de Rougemont pointed out, "One does not become a father by stealing a child. One can steal a child, not paternity. One can steal power, not authority." (5)
The church must, by its faithfulness to the law-word of God, establish, strengthen, and increase its authority. Its power will increase, St. Paul indicated to the Corinthians, as Christians obey the law of God and as the church applies it to its internal affairs, and as it calls upon its member-citizens to apply it to the world around them.
The ground of this increased power is Jesus Christ, who declared, "All power is given to me in heaven and in earth" (Matt. 28:18). As the absolute possessor of all power, He is the predestinating source of all immediate power. He is also the perfect coincidence of power and authority. In the school of history, the church is held back, rebuked, and humbled whenever its power ceases to be grounded in the authority of Christ's law-word, or whenever its authority seeks support in other lords than Christ. The church is required to teach all men and nations "to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world" (Matt. 28:20). His presence and His power undergird those who teach the observance of all that Christ commands.
Petr
(Notice how anarchist Bakunin used materialistic determinism in favor of his doctrine of absolute freedom - "The negation of free will and the right of society to punish")
From R.J. Rushdoony's The Institutes of Biblical Law, pp. 499-500, 502-504:
12. Eminent Domain
Eminent domain is the claim to sovereignty by the state over all the property within the state, and it is the assertion of the right to appropriate all or any part thereof to any public or state use deemed necessary by the state. Compensation for the appropriated property is normally given, but it is not regarded as a binding limitation on the state.
...
Eminent domain is an assertion of sovereignty, and in Scripture is ascribed to God alone. ... This fact of God's eminent domain is celebrated in Scripture as the ground for the confidence of His people (Ps. 24:1, 50:12, I Cor. 10:26, 28, etc.) The eminent domain of the state was not recognized in Israel, as the incident of Naboth's vineyard makes clear (I Kings 20), although it is prophesied as one of the consequences of of apostasy from God the King (I Sam. 8:14). It is specifically forbidden in Ezekiel 46:18.
...
In terms of this claim to sovereignty and and to eminent domain, no constitution and no law has validity, in that all legislation can be set aside by means of an assertion of a prior sovereign power of the state. No legislation can give citizens any immunity against the state wherein the courts maintain the doctrine of eminent domain, whereby every law is subject to rejection wherever the sovereign power of the state so decrees.
Quite logically, the federal income tax legislation calls what the taxpayer is allowed to keep an "exemption" by the state, i.e., an act of grace. All a man's property and income, his artistic and commercial products, are, in terms of this claim to sovereignty and eminent domain, the property of the state, or at least under the control and use of the state.
Only as the sovereign power and saving grace of the triune God are asserted and accepted can the claims of the state to be the source of sovereignty and grace be undercut and nullified.
...
Not surprisingly, the assertion of the sovereignty of the state, a humanistic concept, led in the 18th and 19th centuries to a counter-assertion, the sovereignty of the individual, again a humanistic principle.
For Bakunin, the state was a sham god to be destroyed. Bakunin's trust was in natural law, and he held that natural law knows no state or any theory of state, but only man. "Man can never be altogether free in relation to natural and social laws." Freedom does not consist in revolting against all laws; "in so far as laws are natural, economic, and social laws, not authoritatively imposed but inherent in things," they are to be obeyed, said Bakunin. "If they are political and juridical laws, imposed by men upon men," whether by force, deceit, or universal suffrage, they are not to be obeyed.
"Man Cannot Revolt Against Nor Escape from Nature. Against the laws of Nature no revolt is possible on the part of man, the simple reason being that he himself is a product of Nature and that he exists only by virtue of those laws. A rebellion on his part would be ... a ridiculous attempt, it would be a revolt against himself, a suicide. And when man has a determination to destroy himself, or even when he carries out such a design, he acts in accordance with those same natural laws, from which nothing can exempt him: neither thought, nor will, nor despair nor any other passion, nor life, nor death.
"Man himself is nothing but Nature. His most sublime or most monstrous sentiments, the most perverted, the most egoistic, or the most heroic resolves or manifestations of his will, his most abstract, most theological or most insane thoughts - all that is nothing else but Nature. Nature enevelopes, permeates, constitutes his whole existence. How can he ever escape this Nature? (5)
If man is "nothing but Nature," then man's every impulse has the status of sovereign will. As against the sovereignty of the state and its right of eminent domain, anarchism holds to the sovereignty of the individual and the individual's right of eminent domain.
Accordingly, Bakunin called for "The negation of God and and the principle of authority, divine, and human, and also of any tutelage by a man over men," and for "The negation of free will and the right of society to punish - since every human individual, with no exception whatever, is but an involuntary product of natural and social environment." (6) Because "man is a social animal," man is truly man only in society; therefore, "Social solidarity is the first human law; freedom is the second law." (7) How can man live in society, when every man is his own law? For Bakunin, nature being absolute, the natural order is of necessity the good and true order. It follows, then, that
"VIII. The primitive, natural man becomes a free man, becomes humanized, a free and moral agent; in other words, he becomes aware of his humanity and realizes within himself and for himself his own human aspect and the rights of his fellow-beings. Consequently man should wish the freedom, morality and humanity of all men in the interest of his own humanity, his own morality and his personal freedom.
"IX. Thus respect for the freedom of others is the highest duty of man. To love this freedom and serve it - such is the only virtue. That is the basis of all morality; and there can be no other. (8)
(Citations from Bakunin: G.P. Maximoff, editor: The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism (New York; The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964)
If nature is the ultimate order, then Nature must also be the source of true order. Bakunin's logic is sound, however false his premises. If the state is the true manifestation of natural law, then the state is that area where man will realize true life and true morality. If the individual is this true expression of Nature and of natural law, then the anarchism of the individual, and a society of anarchism, represents the true order. Anarchism and statism thus have been two rival humanistic claimants to the right to represent the natural law and to claim eminent domains.
...
As against the natural law philosophies, Biblical law declares the sovereignty of the triune God and His sole right to eminent domain. All property is held in trust under and in stewardship to God the King. No institution can exercise any prerogative of God unless specifically delegated to do so, within the specified area of God's law. The state thus is the ministry of justice, not the original property owner or the sovereign lord of the land. Accordingly, the state has no right to eminent domain.
The chronic humanistic quarrel between statism and anarchism cannot be resolved except by the rejection of both alternatives in favor of the triune God and His supernatural law.
Pp. 773-6:
8. Power and Authority
St. Paul, in reminding the Corinthian Christians of their destiny, said, "Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world?" (I Cor. 6:2). Moffatt renders this, "Do you not know that the saints are to manage the world?," a meaning we need to remind ourselves of. Church government is a prelude to world government, not by the church but by "the saints."
...
Let us now turn to Homer's Odyssey. Odysseus returns home after many years of wandering. During that time, it had not occurred to him that chastity migt be required of him, although he expected it of his wife and slave girls. The suitors of his wife - for Odysseus was presumed dead - raped some of these slave girls. Odysseus himself acknowledged this: "Ye dogs, ye said in your hearts that I should never more come home from the land of the Trojans, in that ye wasted my house, and lay with the maidservants by force, and traitorously wooed my wife while I was yet alive." The nurse Eurycleia said that twelve of his fifty slave-girls were involved: "Of these twelve in all have gone the way of shame, and honour not me, nor their lady Penelope." After killing the suitors, Odysseus and his son Telemachus, and others, turned to the girls, to execute them. Telemachus hung all twelve on one cable. The reason for the execution was stated by Telemachus: "These ... have poured dishonour on my head and on my mother, and and have lain with the wooers."
(Odyssey citations from S.K. Butcher and Andrew Lang translation)
The offense of the girls was not against God: it was against Odysseus and Telemachus. The involvement of these girls with the men who had raped them, or perhaps seduced them, was not as important as the "dishonour" felt by Odysseus and Telemachus. Law for them had no higher reach than themselves. "The girls were property. The disposal of property was then, as now, a matter of expediency, not of right and wrong." (2)
The same was true in early Rome. The father had power over his children: they were property. Law did not transcend man, and it was essentially limited to the family of man. Subsequently, the state took over family's powers and made itself the father of its people and the source of law.
In either case, law was essentially humanistic and man-centered. Since man as family head or man as statist leader issued the law, the law was total. This appeared very clearly in Plato's Laws:
"The principal thing is that none, man or woman, should ever be without an officer set over him, and that none should get the mental habit of taking any step, whether in earnest or in jest, on his individual responsibility ... in a word, we must train the mind not even to consider acting as an individual or know how to do it (3)
...
Anarchism or totalitarianism, these are the alternatives. Either people, after Plato's hope, who do "not even ... consider acting as an individual or know how to do it," or individuals who are an absolute law unto themselves - these are the alternatives humanism offers to man.
But the saints are to govern the world in terms of God's law, which means that they must know the law. Thus, a basic requirement of healthy church life is a constant study of God' law, its implications and its applications.
The question of authority is inseparable from law in any Biblical sense. A primary meaning of authority is, "The right to command and to enforce obedience; the right to act officially." The origin of authority is a Latin word, augeo, increase. Authority has a natural increase to it. True authority prospers and abounds. Power and authority are not identical words. Power is strength or force; power can and often does exist without authority. The power of Odysseus and Telemachus and the powers of the Roman Empire, were real powers, but, in terms of God's law, they lacked authority, although they did had a formal authority merely as legitimate governments in their societies. As Denis de Rougemont pointed out, "One does not become a father by stealing a child. One can steal a child, not paternity. One can steal power, not authority." (5)
The church must, by its faithfulness to the law-word of God, establish, strengthen, and increase its authority. Its power will increase, St. Paul indicated to the Corinthians, as Christians obey the law of God and as the church applies it to its internal affairs, and as it calls upon its member-citizens to apply it to the world around them.
The ground of this increased power is Jesus Christ, who declared, "All power is given to me in heaven and in earth" (Matt. 28:18). As the absolute possessor of all power, He is the predestinating source of all immediate power. He is also the perfect coincidence of power and authority. In the school of history, the church is held back, rebuked, and humbled whenever its power ceases to be grounded in the authority of Christ's law-word, or whenever its authority seeks support in other lords than Christ. The church is required to teach all men and nations "to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world" (Matt. 28:20). His presence and His power undergird those who teach the observance of all that Christ commands.
Petr