| I must acknowledge
the inspirations I have already had for this work. I have
been raised to be a patriot, a lover of a Nation under God.
The legitimacy of that Nation comes from a divine grant of
rights, so eloquently expressed in the Declaration of Independence.
My training is in Mathematics. My interests
were foundations of mathematics and mathematical logic. I
am seeking an axiomatic basis for developing a Christian theory
of politics. I became aware of the possibility of establishing
such a foundation when I encountered a little booklet by Frederick
Bastiat called The Law, written in 1851. It is called La Loi
in French.
The Law enunciates a species of super-Jeffersonianism. Like
Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, Bastiat placed
the origin of our rights in a Divine grant. However he was
more detailed in his treatment of those origins. He also declared
a principle of voluntary association that he applied to government.
From these foundations he drew conclusions that formed the
basis of a devastating critique of 19th Century Socialism,
which was identical in its aspiration to the ‘accomplishments’
of modern American Liberalism. From this I concluded, that
if Conservatives are 18th Century Liberals, then Liberals
are just 19th Century Socialists!
Bastiat had the honor of being the first to refute the fallacies
of democratic socialism. Here in America during the 20th Century,
Liberals 'achieved' the entire agenda of the French National
Assembly of 1851, with one exception–the advancement
of religion! That is no longer any socialist's goal.
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You may think
that a theoretical exercise by a French popular economics
writer who was a member of the French National Assembly, however
eloquent, could have little practical consequence. Yes, it
fired my imagination. Yes, it was the beginning of this effort.
But so what?
But before it served to inspire me, it was
the spring of inspiration from which Ronald Reagan derived
the impetus to run for Governor of California. I read this
on a French web site devoted to Bastiat. It seems Reagan studied
The Law in a course G.E., his employer, had him take. And
now we are having an exceptional election for Governor of
this golden state.
Now it may seem less strange for a matter so imminently practical
as this Recall Election to be featured on a site devoted to
political theory! But theory has always been born of practice.
My acquaintance with the axiomatic foundations of modern mathematics
does not blind me to its intuitive precursors.
In my Candidate Questionnaire I have taken
the liberty of inserting one theoretical question with which
I have braced all the candidates and also the Governor. “What
are the legitimate functions of government?” Theory
and practice must be intimately related in politics. Politics
was considered the highest study by Aristotle and by many
since. Yet politics is no bloodless abstraction. Liberty was
bought with patriots’ blood. Liberty is in some sense
“unalienable,” but we had been deprived of it.
What we owned by right we none-the-less purchased with blood
in our Revolution.
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But what did we achieve in that
Revolution? The People became the King, the Sovereign. The
slogan of the American Revolution, almost unknown today, was,
"No King, but King Jesus!" But the People are kings
and Christ is King of Kings.
Some Christians seem to think that we still
have a King! But what they have to realize is that We, the
People, are King with all of his duties as well as privileges.
To paraphrase Pogo, “We have met the King and He is
us!”
The foundation of our Nation under God is
a direct grant of rights to the People from God. My rights
do not come from the government of the United States. They
do not even come from the Constitution. Our Constitution was
created expressly to secure “the Blessings of Liberty
to ourselves and to our posterity” not to grant them.
If there are blessings, count on it, there
is a Blesser. The Founders held God to be the author of those
"Blessings of Liberty," which we have so poorly
secured. There you will find the reference to God, which the
Liberals so triumphantly proclaim missing from our Constitution!
God did not need to be explicitly mentioned in a Constitution
established by the People, whose power was understood to be
only from God. Indeed, without our Declaration of Independence
with its reliance upon a Divine grant of rights, the People
had no authority to establish that Constitution. Certainly
no king had consented to that power. Quite the contrary! And,
that power, those rights we had from God, we none-the-less
had to buy with patriots' lives!
There is much more to say of my project of a Systematic Christian
Political Theory and its foundations in Scripture, in experience
and in deontic logic, the logic of rights and duties. More
later.
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