Biblical Law is the basis of civilization, not "natural law." If law and civilization were "natural," why did civilization emerge in Christian nations but not in India or China? After the fall of Rome, St. Patrick Christianized Ireland, and kings like Aethelbert and Alfred made the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount the basis of their legal order.
Alfred's most important work was certainly his Law Code. It is preceded by a long introduction. This contains translations not only of the Ten Commandments, but also of many other passages from the book of Exodus. It is followed by an excerpt from Christ's Sermon on the Mount and by a brief account of apostolic history (with quotations from the apostolic book of Acts). There, Alfred stresses the "jots and tittles" alias the minutiae of God's Law and His Prophets (Matthew 5:17f); the "Golden Rule" (Matthew 7:12); and the God-inspired decision of the First General Assembly of the Christian Church — in order to teach God's Law and His Prophets (Amos 9:11f) as well as His Gospel also in the congregations of Christ (Acts 15:15-29 & 16:4f).
Francis Nigel Lee, King Alfred the Great and Our Great Common Law
Civilization is not the product of universities as much as it is the product of parents teaching God's Law to children, every day, everywhere.
Gary North: Social Overhead Capital -- Intensive Service
Gary North
Backward Christian Soldiers?
14
THE "LITTLE THINGS" OF LIFE
"It is the law-order imparted by parents to children which will determine the success or failure of a society."
Western civilization is the historical product of Christianity. Without Christianity, the development of the West would have been radically different. Of course, secular humanism and various intermediary philosophies have contributed greatly to the growth and shape of Western institutions since about 1660, but without the impact of Christian thought and culture, the foundations of Western secular humanism would not have been laid. It is impossible to think of Western culture without considering the historical impact of Christianity.
Most Protestants understand this fact. Yet at the same time, they have a tendency to denigrate the cultural accomplishments of the Roman Catholic Church in the medieval era. It is as if Protestants think that Western culture sprang up overnight in response to Luther's nailing of the 95 theses on the door. But when we consider the savagery that faced the Irish missionaries in the sixth and seventh centuries, we all should become aware of the vast impact pre-Reformation Christianity had on Europe. In fact, without that impact, there would never have been a Europe. There would have been nothing more than pagan, fragmented tribes of primitive savages, with only an occasional raid from the Norsemen to bring "advanced" pagan culture into their lives.
There is little reason to believe that the level of formal Christian education was very great in pre-Reformation times. Without literacy and the printing press, written European culture was the possession of a tiny elite. What literacy that did exist prior to the eleventh century did so primarily in the monasteries, especially in Ireland. The knowledge of Christ and His work was overwhelmingly verbal, ritualistic, and visual, in the form of statues and architecture, with some painting. The fables, legends, hymns, Bible stories, and reworked pagan myths were mixed together in a complex form, with great regional and linguistic variations, to produce what we classify vaguely as medieval civilization. But it was civilization. It was not primitive. The cultural shambles left by Rome, after Rome had disintegrated, was reworked by Christians to become a full-fledged culture. (See, for example, William Carroll Bark's Origins of the Medieval World and Friedrich Heer's The Medieval World, both available in inexpensive paperbacks).
The question then arises: How was it that pre-Reformation religion could build up a new, thriving civilization, if the level of theological awareness was so minimal? How could it be that the confused mixtures of paganism, Bible stories, myths, relics, and all the other fragments of medieval Christianity could create the foundation, region by region, of a totally new civilization?
BIBLICAL LAW
Roman law now continued in its development, but it became progressively an expression of Biblical law. Justinian's Institutes (with the Digest, Code, and Novels, a part of the Corpus Juris Civilis) clearly reflects what is now called "natural law," but that concept was now becoming something other than Roman law had known.... Natural law, whether in the hands of jurists, scholastics, or Deists, was in essence an anti-trinitarian doctrine, but it was still more Christian than Roman. Natural law became a form of Christian heresy and ascribed to nature the legislative powers and absolute laws which were clearly borrowed from the God of Scripture. Thus, both Roman law and natural law became so thoroughly Christianized with the centuries that no Roman would have recognized them. Even where the wording of ancient Roman laws was retained, a new content and interpretation rendered the ancient meaning remote and barren.
("Notes on the Law in Western Society," The Institutes of Biblical Law [Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973], pp. 786-87.)
The spread of biblical law across the face of Europe served as an integrating factor. Sharing basic presuppositions, and sharing also a single written language (Latin), scholars throughout Europe had the tools for restructuring the face of society. Localism was basic to the political and even ecclesiastical institutions of medieval society, but there was also unity with respect to first principles. Applications were local, but the shared frame of reference allowed the intellectual and moral leaders of society to grapple with the affairs of life along similar lines. The division of intellectual labor could therefore be integrated. Each man's moral and intellectual efforts had more opportunity to be translated into action across the whole continent than would have been the case had there been no shared presuppositions. Men's intellectual efforts could therefore become cumulative. Biblical law redirected the paths of human endeavor, generation after generation, into channels that proved to be incredibly productive. Change was slow, but life was not stagnant.
THE FAMILY
When we think of the law of Moses, we should never forget the requirement of universal family instruction in biblical law: "And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up" (Deut. 6:6-7). The enormous capital resources in time, effort, and personal concern that parents are to expend on their children's legal instruction cannot be overestimated as a factor in cultural and economic growth. Not the State, church, or school, but the family is to be central in legal education. The day-to-day instruction in righteousness which all childrearing involves is the very heart of a civilization. It is the law-order imparted by parents to children which will determine the success or failure of a society.
This instruction may not be self-conscious on the part of parents. This instruction may be simply a series of commands, or punishments, that really is not an integrated program. If so, the children suffer, and the future is compromised. But all parents must instruct children in the law-order of the family, or else chaos results. Parents have a direct incentive to direct their children's footsteps. There can be no family unit without an integrating, disciplining law-order.
When we attempt to reconstruct mentally what local family life may have been like in the medieval world -- which means a period of over a thousand years, and tens of thousands of little communities -- we can barely imagine what went on. We have only the faintest shadows of the past. Medieval families did not leave written documents. But we know the results. Agriculture improved. New technologies were invented, capitalized, and exported. The population grew slowly, erratically, but universally, leading to the progressive cultivation of the soil. (See Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change [Oxford University Press, 1966 edition].)
When we look at the results of a thousand years of Christian instruction, from 500 A.D. to 1500 A.D., we begin to perceive the effect of these millions and millions of seemingly infinitesimal additions of moral capital. From the disintegration of Rome until the Reformation, Christian parents built a civilization. However ignorant of theology they may have been, however erroneous in their perception of things spiritual, not to mention things scientific, they nevertheless succeeded in reshaping the history of mankind. Their ignorance did not keep them from outdistancing India, China, and the other ancient civilizations by the end of the medieval period. There was a cumulative effect of the vast number of successive additions of family capital: agricultural, technological, educational, and moral. Line upon line, precept upon precept, a body of moral capital was built up, and it produced a new civilization.
CONCLUSION
Theological scholarship, apart from concrete applications,. is dead scholarship that leads nowhere. If we are to interpret properly the enormous erudition and mathematical sophistication of today's academic scholarship, we must understand that the Alexandrian scholarship of the dying Classical world and the arcane debates of the late medieval world were testimonies to the death of culture, not a new beginning. The dead within the academic world are buried by others using highly polished spades, tools sharpened with such precision that they are suitable only for splitting academic hairs. It is the "little things" of life, restructured in terms of valid applied theology, not the "big things" of the hair-splitters, that determine the future of a civilization.
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The willingness to sacrifice power and status in the Polis and invest in children is what creates civilization, the Kingdom of God.
Matthew 18:3
Assuredly, I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.Luke 18:16
But Jesus called them to Him and said, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the Kingdom of God.Matthew 10:39
He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it.
Mark 8:35
For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it.
There are many Christians who embark on a quest to obtain political power, thinking that they can use that power for the cause of Christian Reconstruction. It is true, as we saw above, that kings like Justinian, Aethelbert, and Alfred, set Christian civilization in motion by moving their people away from Roman law and toward Biblical law by grounding their legal codes in the Bible. But those kings -- and their people -- were violent savages compared to kings and people today, after a thousand years of Christianization. You would rather live in the 20th century and be governed by Bill Clinton or Barack Obama than live in the 7th century and be governed by any of those kings.
It is also true that God used Joseph, who ruled Egypt, and Daniel, who ruled Babylon. But Joseph was involuntarily sold into slavery. Daniel was taken captive when Israel was invaded and destroyed. They didn't "run for office."
You're not qualified to rule a nation if you're not qualified to obey the commands in Deuteronomy and teach your children God's Law, and actually succeed in raising children who teach their children God's Law (1 Timothy 3;4; Titus 1:6). Timothy was useful to Paul only because Timothy's grandmother taught him the Scriptures (2 Timothy 1:4; 3:15). "Do not set your mind on high things, but associate with the humble" (Romans 12:16). If you dedicate your life to "little things everywhere," you will be blessed by God, and will plant the seeds that God may use in the lives of people who are taken prisoner and end up in a place of influence.
Your family is more important than you reigning in the Polis.
The Kingdom of God -- the Body of Christ, the collective -- prevails over the individual.