Rushdoony and Church and State

Gary begins a series of three podcasts that respond to a recent show from David Barton’s Wallbuilders organization on Christian Nationalism.

Can you imagine a young Jewish man coming up to Jesus and saying, “You know, Jesus, if you would just drop some of your outrageous claims and your moral indictments based on the law as it is written, I might just follow you. The rest I could do without.” There’s a lot that Jesus said that quotes directly from what had already been said in the Old Testament. We don’t get to pick and choose what parts of the Bible we are to believe and act on. There were no red letters when the individual books of the Bible were written. If we take the red letter approach, there’s not much of the Bible that’s left.

This approach has been tried many times before. The second-century heretic Marcion made a distinction between the God of the Old Covenant and the God of the New Covenant. Marcion distinguished between creator and redeemer gods. The creator God is “imperfect, full of wrath, a wild and warlike sovereign, subject to error, and regrets. . . . This is the creator of the world. Of grace he knows nothing; he rules with rigor and justice only. All the misery of human existence results from the character of this God.”

The Old Testament was the revelation of the Creator, the God of the Jews. This is why Marcion rejected the Old Testament and much of the New Testament, even parts of the gospels, since they reinforced the meaning and validity of the Old Testament. Marcion’s canon consisted of a portion of Luke’s gospel and ten Pauline epistles, excluding Timothy and Titus. The remainder of the New Testament was discarded. Marcion “forced the issue of Jewish versus Christian, Old versus New Testament, law versus gospel. His heresy is associated with Gnosticism, the ‘gospel’ of the spiritual. Through liberating oneself from the material world and especially the flesh, one could find salvation.”

Clark’s Biblical Law

Written in the style of a law reference guide, Biblical Law is a layman’s compendium of the Bible’s applications to all manners of contemporary society. With a new introduction by Gary DeMar, Clark’s classic exposé finds itself in a prime position to educate a whole new generation of Christians. Political law, civil law, economics, and more: With topics ranging from war and taxation to contracts and loans, from marriage and hospitality to welfare and husbandry, Clark’s expositions are as practical as they are scriptural.

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Gary begins a series of three podcasts that respond to a recent show from David Barton’s Wallbuilders organization. Barton’s topic was Christian Nationalism and his guest was Mark David Hall, who makes the erroneous claim that Rousas J. Rushdoony was a small and insignificant voice on American history and church and state. Gary takes issue with this and discusses why.

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American Vision’s mission is to Restore America to its Biblical Foundation—from Genesis to Revelation. American Vision (AV) has been at the heart of worldview study since 1978, providing resources to exhort Christian families and individuals to live by a Biblically based worldview. Visit www.AmericanVision.org for more information, content and resources