Theonomy Quotes

“Our modern world defined God as a ‘religious complex’ and laughed at the Ten Commandments as OLD FASHIONED. Then, through the laughter came the shattering thunder of the World War. And now a blood-drenched, bitter world — no longer laughing — cries for a way out. There is but one way out. It existed before it was engraven upon Tablets of Stone. It will exist when stone has crumbled. The Ten Commandments are not rules to obey as a personal favor to God. They are the fundamental principles without which mankind cannot live together. They are not laws — they are The Law.”
― Cecil B. DeMille

“There is no doubt that Christianity teaches pluralism, but a very special kind of pluralism: plural institutions under God's single comprehensive law system. It does not teach a pluralism of law structures, or a pluralism of moralities, for this sort of hypothetical legal pluralism (as distinguished from institutional pluralism) is always either polytheistic or humanistic...”
― Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism

“Of all the wicked heresies and threatening movements facing the church in our day, when Westminster Seminary finally organized their faculty to write something in unison, they gave their determined political efforts not to fight socialism, not to fight homosexuality, not abortion, not crime and mayhem in our society, not subjectivism in theology, not dispensationalism, not cultural relativism, not licentiousness, not defection from the New Testament, not defection from the Westminster Confession of Faith, all of which are out there and they can give their legitimate efforts to… boy the thing they had to write about was theonomy! How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he doesn’t see the problem?”
― Greg Bahnsen

“With its continued dismissal of the law of God in ethics, Fundamentalism expressed both a "spiritualized" form of situational ethics and a "Christianly submissive" statism.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics

“The basis for building a Christian society is evangelism and missions that lead to a widespread Christian revival, so that the great mass of earth's inhabitants will place themselves under Christ's protection, and then voluntarily use his covenantal laws for self-government. Christian reconstruction begins with personal conversion to Christ and self-government under God's law; then it spreads to others through revival; and only later does it bring comprehensive changes in civil law, when the vast majority of voters voluntarily agree to live under biblical blueprints.”
― Gary North

“Those who hold to the Christian faith see law as an ultimate order of the universe. It is the invariable factor in a variable world, the unchanging order in a changing universe. Law for the Christian is thus absolute, final, and an aspect of God's creation and a manifestation of His nature. In terms of this, the Christian can hold that right is right, and wrong is wrong, that good and evil are unchanging moral categories rather than relative terms.

From an evolutionary perspective, however, we have a very different concept of law. The universe is evolving, and the one constant factor is change. It is impossible therefore to speak of any absolute law. The universe has evolved by means of chance variations, and no law has any ultimacy or absolute truth. As a result when we talk about law, we are talking about social customs or mores and about statistical averages. Social customs change, and what was law to the ancient Gauls is not law to the modern Frenchmen. We can expect men's ideas of law to change as their societies change and evolve. Moreover, statistics give us an average and a mean which determine normality, and our ideas of law are governed by what is customary and socially accepted.”
― R.J. Rushdoony, Law and Liberty

“If no divine law is recognized above the law of the State, then the law of man has become absolute in men's eyes--there is then no logical barrier to totalitarianism.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, By This Standard: The Authority of God's Law Today

“A legalist is not someone who places divine law above all else. A legalist is someone who places human law above all else.”
― Rob Rienow, Limited Church: Unlimited Kingdom: Uniting Church and Family in the Great Commission

“This presentation is dealing the question of the modern relevance of God's Law today. What I propose to do is defended the notion of the applicability of God's Law; when the law is properly interpreted according to its Old Testament setting, and adapted to new covenantal conditions.

-Theological Bootcamp II, The Intention of God's Law”
― Kenneth L. Gentry Jr.

“Jesus came for us, but that doesn't mean he came to please us. Jesus came for us, but he does not answer to us. Jesus came for us, but he will not subject himself to our agenda . . .”
― John Koessler, The Surprising Grace of Disappointment: Finding Hope when God Seems to Fail Us

“The future of the family is thus at stake in the future of the private ownership of property. And both rest alike on respect for the sovereign law of God.”
― Rousas John Rushdoony, Law and Liberty

“A great deal of our time will have to be taken up with the destruction of evil. We may not even seem to see much progress in ourselves or round about us, during our lifetime. We shall have to build with the trowel in one hand and the sword in the other. It may seem to us to be a hopeless task of sweeping the ocean dry. Yet we know that this is exactly what our ethical ideal would be if we were not Christians. We know that for non-Christians their ethical ideal can never be realized either for themselves or for society. They do not even know the true ethical ideal. And as to our own efforts we know that though much of our time may have to be taken up with pumping out the water of sin, we are nevertheless laying the foundation of our bridge on solid rock, and we are making progress toward our goal. Our victory is certain. The devil and all his servants will be put out of the habitable universe of God. There will be a new heaven and a new earth on which righteousness will dwell.”
― Rousas John Rushdoony, By What Standard? An Analysis of the Philosophy of Cornelius Van Til

“One must choose theonomy or autonomy, but autonomy is morally crippled. So also are half-way measures between theonomy and autonomy; the blending of the two yields subtle antinomianism.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics

“The law does not save a man, but it does show him why he needs to be saved and how he is to walk after he is saved.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics

“Christ is our great High Priest who sacrifices Himself to discharge the curse of law (Gal.
3:13; Heb. 2:17-3:1; 4:14-5:10). He functions as a prophet of the law, properly interpreting it and freeing it from the overlaid traditions of men (e.g., Matt. 15:1-20). And because the Son of God has heeded the law and hated all lawlessness, God has exalted Him as the Anointed King (Heb. 1:8 f.). The three-fold office of Christ is unified around the permanent expression of God's will, His holy law.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics

“Just as the Son delights in the holy law of His Father, even so the Spirit of God promotes the law as the pattern of our sanctification.
Neither the Son nor the Spirit can be placed in opposition to the Father's law; if this were not so the unity of the Trinity would be dissolved.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics

“The believer is not true to the Great Commission if he plans to disciple the nations without teaching the nations to obey the law of God as well as to observe the ecclesiastical sacraments (read Matthew 28:18-20). If the believer is going to be a trustworthy physician, then, he will give the unbelieving world not only a diagnosis of it's moral dilemma, but especially the gracious antidote from God-all of that antidote, which means the gospel with the entirety of God's law. The physician who gives only a portion of the remedy is untrue to his patient; but when the physician is the Christian taking God's remedy to sinners, and when he holds back from giving the full remedy, he is also tragically untrue to his Lord.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics

“Christ and His apostles endorsed the validity of every Old Covenant Scripture, command, word, letter, and stroke [2 Timothy 3:16-17; James 2:10; Matthew 4:4; 5:18-19]! The New Covenant itself writes the law known in the Old Covenant (in Jeremiah's day] on our hearts today [Jeremiah 31:33; Hebrews 8:10]. Christ, you see, directs us to obey Moses as well!”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics

“The law was never viewed as defining justice exclusively within the narrow confines of Israel. "All of the statutes" revealed by Moses for the covenant nation were a model to be emulated by the non-covenantal nations as well [Deuteronomy 4:6-8]. Accordingly, the Mosaic law was a standard by which unredeemed Canaanite tribes were punished [Leviticus 18:24-271 and which "non-theocratic" rulers were called to obey [Psalm 119:46; Proverbs 16:12] or prophetically denounced for violating [Isaiah 14:4-11; Jeremiah 25:12; Ezekiel 28:1-10; Amos 2:1-3; etc.].”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics

“The Older Testament commandments are not mere artifacts in a religious museum, nor are they ideals suspended over an age of parenthesis and appropriate only for the coming day of consummation. They are the living and powerful word of God, directing our lives here and now.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics

“If vou choose the airline of autonomy you're going to have to end up where you don't want to be, illogical, immoral, unfree with no dignity. And at that point the choice is between life and death. Spiritual life and death, moral life and death, intellectual life and death.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen

“The believer and the unbeliever recognize two different final standards for living including that aspect of living known as thinking, reasoning, and arguing. They are divided by their ultimate commitments, either to Christ or to some other authority (usually themselves).”
― Greg L. Bahnsen

“A person cannot have it both ways regarding his final standard or ultimate reference point. He presupposes and reasons either according to the authority of God or according to some other authority. Attempting to be neutral about God's ultimate authority in determining what we know is a result of a bad attitude toward God's ultimate authority. It is a way of saying that one does not really need the work of Christ to save him in his reasoning.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen