R. J. Rushdoony

“Quare—Me Sollicito? Legero Insanus.”

The law is therefore the law for the Christian man and Christian society.  Nothing is more deadly or more derelict than the notion that the Christian is at liberty with respect to the kind of law he can have.  Calvin, whose classical humanism gained ascendancy at this point, said of the laws of states, of civil governments:

I will briefly remark, however, by the way, what laws it (the state may piously use before God, and be rightly governed by among men.  And even this I would have preferred passing over in silence, if I did not know that it is a point on which many person run into dangerous errors.  For some deny that a state is well constituted, which neglects the polity of Moses, and is governed by the common laws of nation.  The dangerous and seditious nature of this opinion I leave to the examination of others; it will be sufficient for me to have evinced it to be false and foolish. 18

Such ideas, common in Calvinist and Lutheran circles, and in virtually all churches, are still heretical nonsense. 19  Calvin favored “the common law of nations.”  But the common law of nations in his day was Biblical law, although extensively denatured by Roman law.  And this “the common law of nations” was increasingly evidencing a new religion, humanism.  Calvin wanted the establishment of the Christian religion; he could not have it, nor could it last long in Geneva, without Biblical law.

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18  John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, bk. IV, chap. XX, para. xiv.  In the John Allen translation (Philadelphia:  Presbyterian Board of Christian Education, 1936), II, 787 f. (This whole section of Calvin can be read in the Battle’s edition. RBV.)

19  See H. de Jongste and J. M. van Krimpen, The Bible and the Life of the Christian, for similar opinions (Philadelphia:  Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1968), p. 66 ff.

R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press, 1973), pp. 9, 10.