Heidelminicast: Walking Two Miles with Roman Opressors: Christ's Pilgram Ethic (Part 1)

0:00It's a hypomanic cast, and now, Scott Clark. The Theonimists want to impose the mosaic judicial law with the force of the state, but is that what Jesus said? If the Hydeal cast helps you, will you help us keep enjoying? Please make the call for a claim, by clicking on the PayPal link or by sending a check to the Hyde World Reformation Association, 1637, Starman Parkway number 391, S.C.D.O. California, 92027. Walking two miles with Roman oppressors, Christ's Pilgrim Ethic, Part 1. Scripture says, in Matthew 5, 38-42, you've heard it said, and I, for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say to you, do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.

1:05And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who begs from you and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you. In priorities and dominion and economic commentary on Matthew, published in 2000, the Theonomic Reconstructionist writer Gary North, who died in 2022, titles his exposition of this section of the Sermon on the Mount, bribing tyrants. He wrote, and I quote, the Theocentric Issue, here, is the Judgment of God on a rebellious nation. The theme of North's commentary is literally on its face, dominion, and the principal instrument of dominion is law. Indeed, the legal tone of his commentary is palpable, according to North, the goal of the Christian in this life, in this world, before Christ returns, is dominion.

2:07That's his word. That is the lens through which he interpreted the whole of Scripture. According to North, quoting again, God brings tyrants to power in order to use them as rods of iron in history, close quote. They are a judgment on quoting again, injustice in a covenanted nation, close quote. He quotes from Isaiah 10 verses one through six, from which he concludes, quoting, these laws require the covenant keeper to subordinate himself meekly to covenant breakers. The proper response to injustice, Jesus said here, is acceptance, close quote. Jesus, he argued, and I quote, was speaking to a captive people, close quote. He did not, and I quote, call his listeners to revolt, close quote, but to what he calls, quoting again, an open conspiracy of, quoting, visible righteousness. Our passage, he wrote, is not, quoting, a rejection of the Lex Talionus, the law of

3:10retribution, for example, Exodus 21, 24, Matthew 5, 17 through 19, makes that impossible. North believed that God not only punished Israel for her disobedience, but also punishes other nations similarly. And this is why I did the two episodes, making what I think is a central point in this discussion with Christian nationalism, theocracy, reconstructionism, and I just bundle it all up with the shorthand, theorecon. The central point here is that the United States is not a covenanted nation. The last and only covenanted nation in world history and in salvation history, redemptive history, is national Israel. And national Israel's covenant expired on 14 Nissan, about third or fourth of April by our calendar, about three o'clock in the afternoon.

4:11And so it's important for us to remember that the United States is not God's covenanted nation. Scotland was not God's covenanted nation. When North says it was God's judgment on his people, that they had been forced to live under a series of legal systems not based on biblical law, such as civil condition as a mark of God's negative sanctions against a nation. Jesus told them to put up with tyranny for the time being. He told them to go the extra mile, close quote, notice how North frames this? This is what you do for now when your covenanted nation is being disciplined by God. And so the idea that they were a covenanted nation and we are a covenanted nation and there are other covenanted nations is fundamental to everything that North says in his commentary on Matthew. If there isn't any covenanted nation with the Lord now, after the death of Jesus, then his whole argument begins to teeter.

5:12Because the context is tyranny brought on by a national covenant breaking, the requirement to give one's tunic must according to North be interpreted as, this is his language, an implicit bribe. He writes, and I quote, when you are confronted with a man who has the power to take what he wants from you, offer it in advance, honor this power by offering something extra more than he deserves. And then he goes on to say to gain peace is a way to gain time. Time is what righteous men need to begin to construct an alternative to tyranny, close quote. He does mention grace briefly, writing, quoting here, his people are to extend grace to others, just as God extended grace to them. Their outward subordination to authority, extending more to tyrants than they deserve, is part of a general program of grace.

6:13Regular title cast listeners will know that I've done a series of episodes on both post-millennialism and I've done episodes on Theonamine. You can also find on our Theonamine Resource page at Heidelblog.net slash Theonamine, a series taken from Bob Godfrey's chapter on Calvin's rejection of Theonamine. And I've also serialized parts of John Meather's excellent chapter on the attraction of Theonamine from about 1990. Both of those essays were published in The Volume Theonamine, a Reformed Critique, which appeared in 1990. Meather's chapter is valuable for several reasons. Most it was remarkably Timeline, the world he described in 1990. Sounds a lot like the world in which we live now. Second, he showed that for all the rhetoric from Theonamists about how they want to get back to the good old days as they anticipate the future earthly golden age before Christ returns, the Theorecon movement is indebted to modernity, and especially to American evangelicalism

7:20in a variety of ways. So we should perhaps be surprised by the modernity or, more accurately, the post-modernity of Gary North's economic commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, the very idea of an economic commentary on the Gospel of Matthew presupposes that either Matthew intended us to read his Gospel this way, or that it matters not what the author Matthew intended because the reader is sovereign over the text. That's a very post-modern thing to do. It would be a tour de force to show that the Holy Spirit intended Matthew to be interpreted to teach us economics. This is hardly evident from the text of Scripture, as we have it. North did to Matthew the very thing for which we rightly criticized the medievals of doing to biblical texts, looking for a sense in it, via what came to be known as the Quadriga,

8:22the alleged fourfold sense of Scripture, that the human authors did not obviously intend. Why did Jesus sit in a boat in Luke 5, 1 through 8? The Father Hillary said that he did so because the boat symbolizes the church. This is the beauty of quadrigal hermeneutics. If the literal sense is not sufficiently interesting or useful, we can turn to one or more of the figurative senses, the doctrinal, which is the allegorical, the moral or the tropological, or the eschatological, which is the anagogical sense of the text. This would the reader or the interpreter firmly in charge of the text. Of course, for the synoptics and the reason that Jesus sat in a boat was because of the size of the crowd, but that reading did not preach as well. Because it draws us to the objective accomplishment of redemption rather than to the subjective aspects that Hillary wanted to emphasize.

9:24Preachers have always favored the subjective over the objective because the subjective is much easier to preach than the objective. To be sure, I always tell my students that there's nothing wrong with asking what a passage teaches us, if anything, about faith-hope and love. Those were the virtues that were behind the three figurative senses, so you have the literal, and then three figurative senses. It's a problem, however, when we know before we ever read the text that the passage must speak to one or more of the figurative senses or that we are authorized as Gregory I did his commentary on Job, to explore the moral sense of an entire book, who authorized us to turn Matthew into an economics textbook. This is a sort of subjectivism, of which the French deconstructionists would be proud. There is something, however, even more fundamentally a skew here than an unexpected postmodern turn.

10:28In his 1987 critique of Cornelius Vintil's doctrine of common grace, which North rejected, he praised Vantil for plainly teaching what North regarded as an eschatology of defeat. This he wrote is what Amalennialism is. His own reconstructionist post-Balennial eschatology, however, is an eschatology of victory in this world before Christ returns. I submit that, however instructive North's reading of Matthew is for helping us to understand the reconstructionist eschatology and ethic, it tells us virtually nothing about what Jesus said to the church in the sermon on the Mount, or about what God the Spirit was saying through Matthew, or what Matthew as a human author of Scripture intended to say, the fundamental paradigm under which North worked was a legal paradigm, theonomy, the imposition of the mosaic judicial laws upon the post-canonical state by the state upon the people is nothing

11:35if not a legal paradigm. According to North, there is no common grace, and we are just biting our time until the collapse comes. And after that, the reconstruction of civilization along theonomic lines, of course, and the post-Balennial earthly golden age before Christ's return. North mentions evangelism and grace, but the purpose of the commentary is to prepare soldiers for more or less literal war and future earthly conquest. The kingdom of God is not essentially a redemptive sphere, according to North, where the grace of God comes to helpless sinners, until Jesus comes, but the story of a captive people, waiting to defeat their captors and to parade them in the streets. It's almost as if the New Testament did not actually happen. For North, we are wherever we are, still national Israel, in exile or in bondage, waiting

12:39to reconquer Canaan, like the dispensationalists, North wants an earthly glory age, where the dispensationalists want a literal millennium, a literal temple, and a literal priesthood, North wants a physical conquest during a figurative millennium of thousands of years, and earthly golden age, until Jesus returns. An omillennial reading of the Sermon on the Mount comes out rather differently, and we'll consider it in the next episode.