An Informed Faith

Behind all this is the question of authority: is it from God, or from man? If God is the sovereign authority over all things, then His law-word alone can govern all things. Religion, politics, economics, science, education, law, and all things else must be under God, or they are in revolt. If the ultimate authority is man, then all things must serv

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It is significant that godly man in Genesis 1:26–28 is called to exercise dominion (not domination) over the earth, not other men, to develop all things in terms of God’s law-word and to make this earth into God’s realm and domain. Fallen man does not seek dominion, which begins with his salvation and his ability to rule himself, but, rather, the g

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There can be no understanding of Cornelius Van Til apart from this premise. Autonomy, literally self-law, is man’s attempt to supplant God’s law with his own, which, however much in many versions makes claims to be godly and moral, separates itself from the God of Scripture. Man becomes the determiner of “law,” which is more opinion than law. Theon

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Is the alternative the solution? Was Jefferson right in declaring that the best government is the least government? Given the growing and oppressive powers of the state, it is tempting to think so. Without all the oppressive regulating and taxing agencies, how much easier our lives would be! Or would they? I once lived for some years in an area of

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My dream was very logical. A world not under God’s law is soon a world in which only tyranny prevails. Moral order is replaced by statist order, and man ceases to be a person before the law. We should remember that John Dewey, the father of modern statist education, was skeptical about personal consciousness and conscience. For him the reality was

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The ultimate implication in natural theology is the autonomy of man. A true “natural theology” will recognize what Scripture and the confessions tell us about God the Creator; it will not attempt to go from nature to God but will begin with God’s enscriptured Word and will know nature in terms of it. Autonomous reason is then rejected, and all thin

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It is ironic, given the injustices of humanistic law, that men declare God’s law to be “barbaric” and “primitive” and affirm the validity of modern humanistic law. Greek law was brutal towards all save the limited number of elite, and Greek society was a slave society in which the elite few regarded their will as justice. The idealization of the Gr

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The central evil of the modern view is that “religion is a private, personal matter.” This is a revolutionary idea, a product of the modern era and of revolutionary ideologies. Basic to the Western world has been the premise that, because the God of the Scriptures is the living God, the maker of heaven and earth and all things therein, any attempt

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Basically, our choice as lawgiver is either God or man. If we reject God as lawgiver, we have rejected Him as our sovereign, our ruler. The first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1771, defined law thus: “The command of the sovereign power, containing a common rule of life for the subjects.” The law a person recognizes as his law tells us who

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