Dangerous Rule of Law

I keep hearing from a large number of commentators and friends on the necessity of “rule of law” — a sacred cow doctrine born from a rejection of God.

The entire concept of modern democratic government arises from two sources. First is the perverted doctrines of Judaism which turned God into a body of legal precedent abstracted from the Covenant of Moses. The Hellenized rationalist approach to understanding Moses amounts to a rejection of Moses, since the God of Moses was all about personal relations which cannot be abstracted. Jesus fought this with His life by calling people back to a living relationship to God. Yet, somehow we have an entire two millennia of Church History which finds church leaders apparently accepting the view of the Pharisees, by agreeing with their approach to understanding the Bible.

Second is the secular rationalist Enlightenment influences. The leading lights of this intellectual movement understood that to embrace the Aristotelian epistemology — the way of structuring knowledge — one could not include any notice of God or any other deity. That epistemology rules out any acceptance of revelation, at least as it applies to the real world and human behavior. You can believe and love anything you like, but this god business can’t be analyzed without destroying it, so we might as well just set it aside, put it in a category or superstition where it can’t get in the way. Frankly, this is a more honest handling than the entire record of Western Church theology.

So we come to that grand American Experiment as the ultimate expression arising from the Treaty of Westphalia, and all those movements in Europe which sought to reclaim what they thought was meant by the Greek and Roman classical literature. This brings us to that heresy known as the Rule of Law.

Here we have this notion which comes across as a body of obvious truth about what man is, what he can and should be, and how we build a frame of government and social order to achieve that great untapped potential. And while the debate about various elements within this solid and oh-so-sacred structure continue with time, it assumes the rules of debate must follow known laws itself, so that logic is consistently maintained.

Except, nobody ever does it for more than a few spare minutes. The first bunch who seize upon this stuff contains a mere handful of rare true believers, while the vast majority are opportunists waiting their chance. So the true believers get to set it up and the opportunists help them by craftily tweaking things here and there, but keeping it seeming pure and true to theory. Once it has been put into place by whatever means, the opportunists quickly and quietly displace the true believers, typically sounding and acting the same as those true believers, but convinced there is a better way to get it done in the actual execution, and maybe profit a bit on the side.

In other words, it is utterly impossible to root out the personal element. This Rule of Law is more like Pie in the Sky. It has not ever stood more than a brief span before the reality of human nature takes over. The people who truly buy into it never have the drive to sacrifice enough to make it work, and they are the majority. There is this tiny minority with the drive to run things, and they virtually never believe in it, but are cynical enough to play the rest for fools. There has never been any human government honest beyond the lifespan of the one honest guy in charge. So the best you can hope for is one, maybe two generations, and then it’s gone.

It has been tried, again and again, throughout human history. It has always failed. We have had some fairly enlightened dynasties, but never has any elective process kept an honest government. Notice: It requires a non-democratic process to even come close to decent government. It’s random at best, but when you build a government which is founded on popular will, it cannot help but fail. The popular will is too easily manipulated by those with the drive to power and wealth, and that ambition arises directly from evil motives. The only people who win elections are those singularly unfit to rule.

Nothing we can imagine, or structure by our great Aristotelian logic will ever change the fundamental nature of fallen humanity. If you don’t start with the core assertion man is fallen, sinful by nature, even when decent in most social settings, you cannot hope to understand what it takes to make a good government, a just social order. Funny how that truth is rejected by the same people who insist on the analytical approach. If you analyze all the samples available, you are forced to conclude — for whatever reason — mankind is incapable of Rule of Law for more than a brief span of time.

So what we end up with is some core group of elites who are quite sure no one else understands, and they take over. But instead of actually being good rulers, they are always the worst possible. Eventually they discard any pretense and simply crush everyone who dares to question their expertise. Tyranny is the natural end product of every democracy; it is the nature of the beast.

God’s revelation comes to us in what is these days an entirely foreign epistemology, going back far before Aristotle. It assumes you will spend some time considering how that revelation applies, and you will be held responsible for reading between the lines. That is, you will look at what is stated, and realize that is merely a bare manifestation of truth, not the truth itself. You absorb the truth; you don’t construct it by discovery. It is your duty to work back from the words to the assumptions so very hard to put in words. That’s because the truth of what makes for a good and just society is a Person, and truth is best understood as a living being, not some disembodied matrix of ideas.

That epistemology — that path to knowing — shows us the only government you can and should trust is your own family. That is, any government which attempts to usurp any portion of what families do when left to themselves is evil government. You can make the family household responsible for certain results in the broad sense, but civil government has zero claim on the internal processes until those internal processes leak out and interfere with others. Yet because of our modern Aristotelian approach, we cannot hope to find such a view of things unless this is clearly stated somewhere. Sorry, but as far as God is concerned, it’s so obvious it need not be stated, since it is written into the very soul of every human who can think.

So when you read the narrative of God’s revelation — always a narrative, and often symbolic — you realize His Laws require the underlying structure which we label in various ways, but amounts to the extended family, household-clan-tribe social structure, and only those to whom you are related can govern your daily life. Not the Rule of Law, but the Rule of Love — the rulers are bound to you by blood. Sure, they can be cranky idiots, but the risk of such on the balance of things is still far, far better than the guaranteed failure of democracy.

Rule of Law is a fable, a fantasy, pure fiction. The fundamental truth of the universe is knowable only in terms of personal relationships, because the very essence of Truth is a Person. This understanding is the one God Himself presented to humanity. Any other understanding, and any other social order than what He revealed, is doomed as sinful. Thus, I teach again and again, any government which does no conform to the revealed Laws of God has no claim on your allegiance; it cannot be called “legitimate.”