THE CHALCEDON REPORT
December 1978, No.160

Restitution

Basic to Biblical law is the fact of restitution. God's law requires restitution and sets it forth as the essence of justice or righteousness. Between man and man, restitution is required, as such laws as Exodus 22:1-6, etc., make clear, and this restitution must be at least double and can be as much as four-fold or five-fold (Ex. 22:1; Luke 19:8). Between man and God, restitution is also basic to justice, and Christ's perfect obedience to the law, and His atonement on the cross, assuming the death penalty passed upon us, constitute Christ's work of restitution for His people.

Wherever the law of restitution prevails, it follows that crime does not pay. If the minimum restitution for a crime is the restoration of full value, plus the same, (i.e., for a theft of $100, $200 is restored), it follows that crime, and sin in any fashion, is highly unprofitable. The ultimate penalty of restitution can include death ("then thou shalt give life for life," Ex. 21:23).

Although there were periods of apostasy, and also the common rebellion of civil governments against God's law, the usual practice of the Christian community over the centuries has been to require restitution as God's mandate. This meant too that the habitual criminal, in terms of the case law of the incorrigible son (Deut. 21:18-21), was to be executed. The execution of habitual criminals was once common in the United States; later, third or fourth offenders were given life imprisonment, and then even this disappeared.

Biblical law has no prison system. A criminal was held in prison only pending a trial, and then either made restitution, or was a bond-servant until he worked out his restitution, or was executed.

As late as 1918, the United States echoed this principle of restitution in its foreign policy. In a report on "Armenia and her Claims to Freedom and National independence," it was stated: "According to the law of all civilized people, including the Sheri law, no murderer can inherit the property of the victim of his crime. That inheritance or estate must pass not to the murderer but to the next of kin of the victim" (U.S. Statutes at Large, 65th Congress 1917-1918, 3rd Session, Senate Document No.316). This statement, while not specifically Christian did all the same set forth restitution.

In recent years, the erosion has been rapid. Instead of seeing love as the fulfilling or keeping of the law (Rom. 13:8), modern churchmen have seen love as replacing law. Judges have readily picked up this doctrine. I recall the shock of a small businessman, in the late 1950s. A man with a record of passing bad checks had bilked him also. When he went to court, the businessman saw the guilty man given a suspended sentence and placed on probation. He himself was savagely lectured by the judge for demanding restitution and treated as unloving and unchristian.

Since then, of course, this evil has proliferated, and law has decayed because of this hostility to restitution. Crime is now highly profitable, and injustice prevalent.

But the fact remains that restitution is God's law, and it is God's law not only for all relationships between man and man, but also between man and the earth, and man and God. Remember, God required the land to have seventy years of Sabbaths by sending the people into captivity "until the land had enjoyed her sabbaths" (II Chron. 36:21). In one way or another, in His own time and way, God requires and effects restitution. At the end, the final accounting is rendered.

Restitution thus can no more be abolished than God can be abolished. When men sidestep or by-pass restitution, God exacts a penalty. We can evade and play games with man's law, but never with God's law.

Without restitution, man's idea of law loses its center and becomes erratic and unstable. Among the more common eccentricities of law have been emphases on class, caste, race, or status, whereby the law becomes an instrument for inequality. A related eccentricity is the emphasis on equality, so that law and justice are separate from justice as restitution and made the instruments of a drastic levelling of men, circumstances, and institutions. Eccentric law loses its orientation towards righteousness or justice and becomes governed by social standards, mores, and pressures. Law then becomes the product of pressure politics, not of a principle of justice.

But restitution cannot flourish on the social and civil scene if it is weak or absent on the theological level. Where the legal aspect of Christ's atonement as His work of satisfaction or restitution for the sins of His people is weakened or denied, there too all of the foundations of law are affected. The cross of Christ sets forth restitution as the essence or nature of God's law. It makes clear that there is no reconciliation between God and man apart from Christ's satisfaction for our sins and the imputation of His work to us. The heart of the gospel is this legal fact of the atonement. Regeneration and conversion, basic as they are, still rest on Christ's work of atonement. Justification by faith in and through Christ's work of satisfaction is the foundation of our standing before God.

The cross requires us to see the centrality of restitution in our standing before God and in our world of law and human affairs. If we do not require restitution of ourselves and all men, God will require it of us.

Restitution is basic to Biblical law. For all offenses, man must make restitution to man. For offenses against God, only Jesus Christ can make restitution, and basic to the doctrine of the cross is the fact of restitution, the satisfaction of God's justice. Thus, the principle of restitution goes hand in hand with justification by faith in Christ's atoning work.

Humanism, however, has other doctrines of law, all of which stress man's salvation by works of law. Whenever in the civil order men adopt a humanistic doctrine of law, they undermine Biblical theology because humanistic law requires another doctrine of salvation.

First among the humanistic doctrines of law is the doctrine of law as a means of reformation, i.e., the salvation of man by legal reformation. A leading figure in this faith was the Quaker, William Penn. Although it was about a century and a half before his ideas were adopted, it was Penn's thinking which gave the rationale.

Penn, as a Quaker, believed that every man has within him an inner light, a spark of divinity, and, by heeding that inner light, a man can be saved. The solution therefore to all problems of crime is simple, from this perspective. Give the criminal an opportunity to develop his inner light and become a new man. This, of course, was not anything but heresy but, with the development of the Enlightenment, and then Romanticism, this doctrine caught on. As Roger Campbell, in Justice Through Restitution (Mott Media, Box 236, Milford, Mich. 48042, 1977) points out, the Quakers became leaders in "prison reform".

How was the criminal's inner light to save him? The humanistic reformers, in England, Europe, and America, saw salvation in isolation from corrupting influences. Let the criminal be placed in a new kind of monastic cell in order to meditate on his sins and become a new man through the inner light. As Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, The Birth of the Prison (Pantheon Books, N.Y., 1977), has pointed out, prisons began to be built as a new kind of monastery for a new kind of monk.

Prisons, moreover, began to gain new names to fit their new functions. The term "penitentiary" recalls medieval penitential exercises. "Reformatory" spells out the humanistic doctrine of reform or salvation by law. "Correctional facility" is again a term which witnesses to the salvific purpose of the law as reformation, as does "reform school."

Conservatives and churchmen who advocate "stiffer" applications of the prison system had better re-assess their efforts. They are demanding a humanistic plan of salvation. Biblical law requires restitution, not imprisonment, and with habitual criminals, the death penalty; only such a system means that crime does not pay. The prison system does not solve the problem of crime, and prisons are not reformatories but schools for crime. Men come out worse than they went in.

Of course, the means of reformation by law have changed in recent years. A variety of more modern means of salvation have been proposed and tried. One is work therapy, prison shops, work farms, and the like. Another is psychological and psychiatric help, a very popular but highly ineffective practice. Still another is education, so that both in and out of prison, in dealing with all men, many humanists see the hope of the salvation of man and the reform of society in education. (It was for this reason that I titled my study of the philosophies of statist education, The Messianic Character of American Education.) All of these efforts have one thing in common, failure.

But the idea of law as a means of reformation has not been limited to the theory of penology: it has been applied to all of civil society. Statist legislation has today as basic to its motivation the faith that man and society can be saved by works of law. Every time a legislature, parliament, or congress meets, it works to save man by law. Moreover, now, as humanism is in its death-throes all over the world, it works more furiously to legislate salvation and to stifle dissent.

What happens to churchmen who live at peace with a civil government whose life and purpose are governed by a humanistic plan of salvation by law rather than by Biblical law? First, it is clear that they have failed to understand Scripture or to apply it. They have not seen the ramifications of the atonement, nor that Scripture is a total word for all of life. They try to serve two masters, two plans of salvation (Matt. 6:24), with sorry results. How can men advocate one plan of salvation in the church and another through civil government without schizophrenia and moral paralysis?

Second, the church then recedes from most of the world, which is thus surrendered to another plan of salvation. It limits its concern to man's soul and to heaven, and it surrenders God's word to the devil. Theology becomes irrelevant to life, and is no longer the queen of the sciences. The Bible becomes a devotional manual, not God's command-word for the whole of life and the world.

Clearly, for the church to live at peace with the doctrine of salvation by law in the state means to compromise justification by faith everywhere. Is it any wonder that the church has long been in retreat? This retreat cannot he reversed until the church stands clearly against all doctrines of salvation by works of law and declares that God's word is the sufficient word for man, in church and state. Only Biblical law is in harmony with the Biblical doctrine of salvation.

(In subsequent months, other humanistic doctrines of salvation by law will be discussed.)

CHALCEDON REPORT NO.162
Law as Regulation
February 1979

Biblical law requires restitution; humanistic law has some man-conceived alternatives to God's law. First, as we have seen, law is held to be a means of reformation. Man is to be saved by legally compelled reformation.

Second, another humanistic approach to the problem of law is salvation by regulation. The purpose of the state and of law is seen as prevention. By means of a multitude of rules and regulations, the humanistic state proposes to control man so thoroughly that sin will become impossible. Men will be good, because no other option will be open to them.

Superficially, this principle has been with us for centuries, and some aspects of it have been adopted by many Christians. To go beyond God's law is to play god, and to hope for salvation by man-made means. Thus, temperance is clearly required by God's law; law-enforced prohibition is another matter. It is not liquor which turns men into drunkards, in the moral sense, but intemperate men who use liquor to become drunkards. Guns do kill, but gun control does not alter the murderous heart of man. When we stress the legal solution, we under-rate or by-pass the religious answer. We then give ourselves and society a false emphasis.

But such regulations are superficial when compared with the current trend in legislation. The citizen, the laborer, the industrialist, the farmer, and every producer is surrounded by a vast network of rules and regulations. Moreover, we cannot understand the meaning of this plan of salvation by regulatory laws unless we recognize its religious nature. These humanistic law-makers believe themselves to be the very soul of benevolence and nobility. They want a good world for all of us, and it pains them that we misunderstand their motives. They are religiously governed, and their faith rests, first, on a belief that man can be saved. Bad as man's plight may be, man can be salvaged, and, even more, perfected. With this salvation and perfection, man can enjoy life and this earth as never before, and a world order with world peace is a very real possibility and a necessary goal. Second, the salvation of man can be best or only accomplished by man, and the human agency best suited for this function is the state. The state is thus modern man's true church and savior. Politics becomes dominant in human interest and action whenever men see salvation in humanistic terms. Then the cry is, 0 Baal, save us. We fail to comprehend the direction of modern politics if we do not see that the state is humanistic man's agency for self-salvation.

Third, for the state to become an effectual savior, it must control every area of life and thought. This means that laws must regulate all human activities and direct them into approved and salvific channels only. Accordingly, regulatory laws govern education, economics, agriculture, production and consumption, health, welfare, and all things else. This means too the progressive regulation of the press and of religion. Increasing statist efforts whittle away by regulation at every freedom of the press and of religion, because humanistic salvation by regulation leads step by step to total regulation for total salvation.

In the earlier form of humanistic law, law as the means of reformation, prisons were made into the new monastery for the reformation of law-breakers. Like the monk, the prisoner faced a totally prescribed life as the regimen of his salvation and sanctification. This concept of law as reformation has been expanded to circumscribe all men: law, salvific law, is now the salvation of man by the total regulation of all men. The monastery was and is a voluntary place, and its roots are in self-regulation, something the humanists forgot. In the Great Society of humanistic man, all the world will be turned into a prison, with total regulation by total law. Of course, the humanistic reformer believes that our current protests against these regulations is evidence of sin on our part, but time, and humanistic law, will change us all, and we will rejoice, each of us in our well-regulated nook or cell.

As a result, all over the world, the humanistic legal reformers are working busily for our salvation. Every day, a multitude of new regulatory laws surrounds us to hem us in from sin. In the U.S.A, the Federal Register is evidence of this. Not content with the slow-moving pace of Congress with its hundreds of new laws, the administration and the bureaucracy issue new regulations by the thousands through the Federal Register. How great is their concern for us! They plan to save us, come what may.

Like it or not, men will get humanistic salvation unless they find theocentric salvation through Jesus Christ. Our option is not between God's salvation or none, but between God's plan and man's plan. The fall originated in the creature's plan for his own salvation (Gen. 3:5), and the pages of history give us the grim struggle between various man-made plans, and also and supremely, the struggle between man-made plans, and God's eternal plan through Jesus Christ. Man, in rejecting God's plan, issued his own. By means of his own law-decree, man plans to save himself. If the state is anything but Christian, it will seek to impose on all men a man-made system of law and salvation. The choice is between God's law and man's law; it is between Christ and Caesar.

CHALCEDON REPORT NO. 163
Law as Redistribution
March 1979

Biblical law requires restitution and restoration. Humanistic law begins by seeking the reformation of man by law. In reformatory legislation, the law-breaker is the goal of controls. The next step in humanistic law is regulatory legislation. Regulations seek to control all men to make crime impossible, or nearly so.

But humanistic law does not stop there. The third step is redistribution. The control of all men goes hand in hand with the control of all property. Men, land, and money are redistributed. Law becomes a total plan for the total salvation of men and society by means of total control.

In education, the goal becomes the equalization of all children in every way, so that grading is seen as an evil to be overcome or eliminated. Schooling stresses, instead of the acquisition of knowledge, the acquisition of social attitudes which will enable the child to belong to a levelled, redistributive society. Instead of an emphasis on excellence and individual achievement, there is instead an emphatic demand for socialization and group dynamics.

In religion, humanism seeks by law to eliminate or bring into conformity those churches which deny the Great Community as ultimate. All appeals must be to Caesar rather than to God. Ultimacy is held to be in the state, not in God, so that the state is viewed as god walking on earth and as the agency of social salvation. The Christian School is thus seen as a dangerous agency, because it teaches a higher allegiance and trains youth in terms of another faith.

In economics, redistributive legislation in Marxist countries means the open transfer of land and wealth from private ownership to the state as the trustee of all the people. In the democratic nations, the same redistributive goal is achieved by a variety of means, most notably the inheritance tax and the income tax. In the United States, 75% of all farms, businesses, and activities are wiped out by the death of the owner because of the confiscatory nature of the inheritance tax. The income tax works annually to redistribute wealth, as does the property tax, and a variety of other taxes. In fact, the goal of taxation can no longer be said to be the maintenance of civil order and justice; rather, its goal is social revolution by means of taxation. Taxation has indeed become the new and most effective method of revolution; it is the reactionary redistributionists who still think in terms of the armed overthrow of existing orders. The more liberal ones know that taxation is the more efficient means of revolution.

In politics, the redistributive state works to equalize and scatter all independent sectors, whether religious, racial, or economic, which can form pockets of strength and resistance to the saving power of the state. The redistributive state wants no dissident minorities, only an undifferentiated and submissive majority.

In brief, the redistributive state wants a world beyond good and evil. Where there is no good nor evil, there can be no criticism, and no judgment. Doris and David Jonas, an anthropologist-psychiatrist couple, declared, in Sex and Status (1975), after discussing a number of obviously warped and sinning relationships, "What, then, constitutes a basis for an harmonious male-female relationship? We are forced to the conclusion that this is not determinable from the outside" (p. 102f.). For them, there being no good and evil, no God, sin and perversion are merely matters of taste and choice. In a world beyond good and evil, there is no standard for condemning a civil government, and the civil law is thus beyond criticism. Moral judgment disappears, and coercion replaces it. In fact, where there is no moral law, and no God whose court is the source of all law and judgment, then the only binding force in any social order is coercion. Thus, the more humanistic a state becomes, the more coercive it becomes. The brutal slave labor camps of the Marxist states are not aberrations nor errors of principle on their part: they are the logical outcome of their humanism. The humanistic state replaces God's predestination with man's plan of predestination by total coercion, and it replaces God's moral law with a purely coercive law whose purpose is alien to man's being and destructive to it.

All three forms or stages of humanistic law are very much with us all over the world. The Christian cannot be indifferent to law without denying his faith. Humanistic law is a plan of salvation in terms of Genesis 3:5; its goal is to make man his own god, determining good and evil for himself However, when man seeks to affirm himself in defiance of and apart from the triune God, what he actually does is to destroy himself. By his sin, he brings in death; by his rebellion in the name of freedom, he assures his slavery.

God's law, in its every aspect, requires restitution and restoration. "God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap" (Gal. 6:7; cf. II Cor. 9:6). What shall this generation reap, when churchmen count it a virtue to be hostile to restitution and to God's law?

Law can never be neutral. Law always condemns one kind of practice and protects another. The law can be fair, and in its procedures conscientious, but it is never neutral. Law is always religious: it is an expression of faith concerning the nature of things and a statement of what constitutes righteousness or justice. Historically, and in essence always, law is a theological concern. For churchmen to be indifferent to the triumph of humanistic law means that they are indifferent to the claims and demands of the triune God. Such an indifference is suicidal, and it is sin.