Posted by
ValiantForTruth on Monday, March 07, 2011 11:52:46 AM
'Failure to take seriously the need for religious freedom will doom any attempts at democracy. The grounding of human liberty rests in the belief that our rights come from God.' - Robert Morrison
Re: http://townhall.com/columnists/robertmorrison/2011/03/05/bowing_to_persecutors_endangers_christians/
Thanks to Robert Morrison for summarizing the uniqueness of American freedom. His intent was to expose the Islamic culture based on Sharia law as incompatible with ever achieving freedom. They are bound in their Old Covenant mindset with their own perversions of Mosaic Law. But more interesting is the implicit condemnation of the religious practice of radical naturalism that is being imposed on the American culture.
Why does freedom and civil liberty depend on religious liberty? Why is religious liberty not the norm rather than the exception in the history of man? Why is it now not enjoyed by all men in all nations since America has demonstrated its fruits? Why is the importance of religious liberty no longer recognized in America, and why is its first amendment guarantees under assault?
The answer to these questions will reveal why the Darwinite Leftists are the greatest threat to the American Republic. Many have discernment to recognize the flaws in the nations under the influence of Islam, but how many can see the same faults being revealed in Western liberalism? Tyranny comes in many flavors, but in common they share the suppression of an open Bible.
The belief that rights come from God has revolutionary implications. If rights are defined with respect to God, then there must be a consensus of who God is and a submission to His authority. Implicit in this belief is that man is not God, but that he is dependent on God to reveal Himself and to make His will known to man. So for the colonial Americans, the Personal and Infinite God of the Bible became the reference point for understanding their being, their knowledge of truth and their concepts of law and morality. True knowledge of the self-revealed God transformed their culture.
The first amendment guarantees the right of religious liberty. How did they understand this to be fundamental to civil liberty? If men are made in the image of God and morally responsible before God, then it follows that a man's conscience is the sacred property of God alone. This is the fundamental truth from which liberty comes forth: all men have a consciousness of his creator. Therefore, all men have infinite worth and dignity that demand their conscious not be violated, being subject to the commandments of men.
So civil rights became associated with the liberty to fulfill the law of conscious, which is equivalent to the natural law. As image bearers all men deserve the liberty of conscious. The state was not to interfere in a man's duty to obey the Law of God written on his conscious.
Men preach the Word, but it is God who gives the increase. Unless the Spirit does His work of applying the Word in regeneration and transformation, then men remain dead in their sin. It is this theology that we say is the testimony of the apostolic doctrine of Christ that brought an end to the tyranny of church and state hierarchies in America, whether they be Catholic or Protestant.
Christ builds His churches and His eternal kingdom is extended into every generation and nation. Though the preaching ministries of the churches come the knowledge of God which builds up Christian families. This is the work of God and under His blessing can transform whole cultures; it can also result in persecution depending on the sovereign purposes of God.
Our premise is that liberty is dependent on the doctrines of sovereign grace and man's responsibility worked out by Augustine and applied by Calvin. When there is no consensus of these doctrines even among the churches, then we cannot expect their transforming influence to be felt in the culture.
Our heritage in Biblical Theology is being transformed into a self-idolatrous world view of the radical naturalists that try to create a reality independent of God. History reveals their folly, but they like to deny history as well as natural law.