“The conflict of Christianity with Rome was political from the Roman perspective, although religious from the Christian perspective. The Christians were never asked to worship the Romans gods; they were merely asked to recognize the religious supremacy of the state. As Francis Legge observed, ‘The officials of the Roman empire in time of persecution sought to force Christians to sacrifice, not to any heathen gods but to the genius of the Emperor and the fortune of the city of Rome; and at all times the Christian’s refusal was looked upon, not as religious, but as a political offense. …. Whatever rivalry the Christian Church had to face in its infancy, it had none to fear from the deities of Olympus.’ The issue, then, was this; should the emperors law, state law, govern both the state and the church or were both state and church, emperor and bishop alike under God’s law? Who represented true ultimate order? God or Rome, eternity or time? The Roman answer was Rome and time, hence Christianity constituted a treasonable faith and hence a menace to political order. The Roman answer to the problem of man was political and not religious. This meant, first, that man’s basic problem was not sin but political order. This Rome sought to supply religiously and earnestly. Second, Rome answered the problem of the One and the Many in terms of Oneness, the unity of all things in terms of the state, Rome. Hence, over-organization, simplification, and centralization increasingly characterized Rome. “
R. J. Rushdoony
The One and The Many — pg. 94
1.) If the State was asking for the Christians to have recognized its religious supremacy then the problem was religious even if the State would have defined the problem as “political.”
2.) This demonstrates that political problems cannot be cordoned off from religio-theological foundations. In point of fact, every political problem, before it is a political problem, is a religio-theological problem.
3.) Sacrifice to the genius of the Emperor and to the fortune of the city of Rome was a supremely religious act.
4.) Interesting that the current state also asks its citizens to sacrifice to the genius of the Political system. The only difference is that the sacrifice the current citizenry is asked to make is to offer up their children to the State via their attendance to state Churches (sometimes euphemistically referred to as “Public Schools.”)
5.) When fallen man makes the polis that which represent ultimate order the consequence is then that any concept of God or heaven is cast in the image of the polis that is understood to represent the ultimate order. To the contrary, when the ultimate order is seen as God and Eternity then the consequence is that the polis and the citizenry begin to incarnate, in various ways, God and eternity into Time and space.
The result of this is Augustine’s City of God vs. City of Man. The City of God, on earth, is built up as men bow to the Lordship of Jesus Christ so that His will is increasingly done on earth as it is in heaven. To the contrary, the city of man is built up as men bow to themselves, collectively considered, and so as man is taken as the ultimate man incarnates the ugliness of “hath God really said.”
6.) Christianity, when it is most vital, should always be considered a threat to pagan states and a menace to their political (and social) order since Christianity screams that such political and social orders are unreal and illusory and idolatrous to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
6.) Because Rome’s view that the problem of man was political and not religious therefore we know that Rome had made politics their religion. Man without God will always turn religion into politics and politics into religion. Since, for fallen man, above them is only sky, therefore fallen men will always make a Idol out of the political process.
7.) Those who deny that the political order can be, should be, or is divinized will always be considered threats to the State. If the conviction is that “in the state we live and move and have our being” all those who deny that precept must be either marginalized or eliminated.
8.) When Rushdoony speaks of “unity of all things in terms of the state” what he is saying is that the state becomes the only point of integration of man. All things must find their meaning in terms of the state. The state becomes the background against which, “man as chameleon” must and does find his identity.
That we are at that point today is testified to by the necessity of the State to provide our health care. In that pursuit there is the thrust of “unity of all things — even medicine — in terms of the state.
9.) If you can’t see our current situation in this country summarized in Rushdoony’s statement, “Hence, over-organization, simplification, and centralization increasingly characterized Rome,” you don’t have a pulse and you might consider that you are a Zombie.
10.) Theonomy or autonomy. The God of the Bible or Man as God. One never escapes either law or theocracy. It is never a question of “whether or not law,” or “whether or not Theocracy,” it is only a question of whose law and whose Theocracy. You can always tell which God is supreme by observing which law is enacted.
I learned ironically from enemies of Christianity, Edward Gibbon and Thomas “Darwin’s Bulldog” Huxley, how much modern egalitarianism might be indebted to imperial jurisprudence that renders its subjects equal in the servitude to the omnipotent state:
http://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume2/chap44.htm#ofpersons
“The perfect equality of men is the point in which the extremes of democracy and despotism are confounded; since the majesty of the prince or people would be offended, if any heads were exalted above the level of their fellow-slaves or fellow-citizens. … But in the eye of the law, all Roman citizens were equal, and all subjects of the empire were citizens of Rome. That inestimable character was degraded to an obsolete and empty name. The voice of a Roman could no longer enact his laws, or create the annual ministers of his power: his constitutional rights might have checked the arbitrary will of a master: and the bold adventurer from Germany or Arabia was admitted, with equal favor, to the civil and military command, which the citizen alone had been once entitled to assume over the conquests of his fathers.”
http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE1/NatIneq.html
“For the a priori arguments of the philosophers in the last century of the [Roman] Republic, and the first of the Empire, stand examination no better than those of the philosophers in the centuries before and after the French Revolution. As is the fashion of speculators, they scorned to remain on the safe, if humble, ground of experience, and preferred to prophesy from the sublime cloudland of the a priori; so that, busied with deduction from their ideal “ought to be” they overlooked the “what has been,” the “what is,” and the “what can be.”
It is to them that we owe the idea of living “according to nature”; which begot the idea of the “state of nature”; which begot the notion that the “state of nature” was a reality, and that, once upon a time, “all men were free and equal”–which again begot the theory, that society ought to be reformed in such a manner as to bring back these halcyon days of freedom and equality; which begot laissez faire and universal suffrage;
…
3 Sir H. Maine observes that the “strictly juridical axiom” of the lawyers of the Antonine era (“omnes homines naturâ æquales sunt”), after passing through the hands of Rousseau and being adopted by the founders of the Constitution of United States, returned to France endowed with vastly greater energy and dignity, and that “of all ‘the principles of 1789’ it is the one which has been least strenuously assailed, which has most thoroughly leavened modern opinion, and which promises to modify most deeply the constitution of societies, and the politics of States” (Ancient Law, p. 96).”
Didn’t Rushdoony used to argue that modern democratic system is like the “divine right” absolute monarchy turned upside down?
Robert B. Rhett also made that argument in 1860:
http://www.civilwarcauses.org/rhett.htm
“the people of the non-slaveholding North are not and cannot be safe associates of the slaveholding South under a common Government. Not only their fanaticism, but their erroneous views of the principles of free governments, render it doubtful whether, separated from the South, they can maintain a free Government among themselves. Brute numbers with them is the great element of free Government. A majority is infallible and omnipotent. “The right divine to rule in kings” is only transferred to their majority.”