Kevin Craig for Congress: Baldwin's Blunder

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Baldwin's Blunder

I like Chuck Baldwin, Constitution Party nominee for President. I've quoted him several times, and I haven't ruled out voting for him rather than Bob "Your Papers, Please" Barr.

But Baldwin's latest column is badly misguided.

He quotes Martin Luther's great line:

If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battlefield besides is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.

Then Baldwin makes this surprising chain of assertions:

the real battlefield today is not abortion. It is not homosexual marriage. It is not Social Security. It is not al Qaeda. It is not taxes. It is not inflation. It is not electing conservatives. It is not posting the Ten Commandments. It is not even the high cost of gasoline. That is not to say that those issues are not important and not deserving of our best efforts and attention, because they are. But those issues do not represent the major battlefield today.

As I was reading these words, I was racking my brain trying to think what the major battlefield of the day was, if none of the above. I was shocked by Baldwin's answer:

The battlefield where the devil has amassed his greatest forces and is thrusting his deadliest armies is the surrender of our national sovereignty and independence, and the creation of global government.

To his credit, unlike Phyllis Schlafly, Baldwin is able to tell the truth about Bush:

before Bush was a Republican, before he was a "conservative," before he was a Christian, he was and is a globalist, as was his father and grandfather before him.

Relying on Jerome Corsi's investigations, Baldwin warns of the promises Bush made in March of 2005 in the "Security and Prosperity Partnership," which I have written about many times before. There can be no doubt that the European Union is a model for US-Mexican-Canadian convergence in a "North American Union" of some kind.

But why is this worse than the murder of 50 million children, the destruction of the family, the $83 trillion bankruptcy of America, or the secularization of American Law?

What if Thomas Jefferson wrote the Constitution for a "North American Union" in which the regional government had no jurisdiction over abortion, homosexuality, marriage, retirement planning, healthcare, home loans, or a thousand other policy issues? What if the regional government of North America were not a secular government, but a Christian libertarian Theocracy?

Gary North explains why Baldwin is not a visionary Christian statesman, but just another conservative nationalist:

There were no passports in the West before 1914. Few Western nations had rigorous immigration laws. There was also no mass democracy or socialism. People who would obey the laws and work hard were seen as a benefit. But mass democracy and the rise of socialist ideology changed all that. With the progressive income tax came immigration barriers in every nation. The welfare State is illiberal with regard to work-oriented immigrants. To the extent that welfare State thinking has become common among Christians, they too have adopted the closed-border mentality.

The sovereignty of the nation is the modern substitute for the divine right of kings and legislatures. It was a doctrine asserted by the French revolutionaries in the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen" in 1789. Point three declares: "The source of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation; no group, no individual may exercise authority not emanating from it." Nationalism has since become a major ideology in the modern world. It lodges absolute sovereignty in the nation.

The danger with this is the danger of proclaiming absolute sovereignty for any human institution. When this is done, then men are tempted to overcome its supposedly final judgment through violence. Revolution, terrorism, and military conquest become both the justification and the means of replacing one absolute earthly sovereign with another. The doctrine of "divine right" leads to the doctrine of "might makes right."

The Biblical doctrine is opposed to all theories of divine right. God is absolutely sovereign, and all [legitimate] human sovereignties [if any] are delegated by Him. All human sovereignties are under God's law, and God's law is always administered by agencies -- not by one single agency, but by plural agencies. There must always be a legal and institutional check and balance on every human agency. Furthermore, there will always be an institutional check: big bullies eventually encounter bigger bullies or an alliance of defenders. But for the sake of peace, there should be legal checks that invoke lawful, predictable, and legitimate restraints on unwarranted power. Checks and balances are basic to Christian liberty.

This is why the political conservative's rejection of international law and international justice is misguided, if this rejection is based on permanent principle rather than temporary tactics. In an era such as ours -- an era of legal chaos and competing national religions -- nationalism is a legitimate check on the expansion of humanist empires, but if conservatism's intellectual defense of national sovereignty is made in terms of an absolute and permanent national sovereignty, then the defender has adopted one more version of the divine rights doctrine: the divine right of autonomous nations. Only Jesus Christ possesses divine rights, yet He graciously humbled Himself to be judged by a pagan imperial court for the sake of the world.

All institutions are under God's law. God's laws are to be enforced institutionally. No one can legitimately claim divine rights, a claim of locating a final, unitary, earthly court of appeal beyond which there can be no earthly appeal.

Christ's victory at Calvary in principle reclaimed the ownership of the whole earth from Satan, and it legally transferred this certificate of ownership to God's people. The certificate of ownership is the New Testament itself. The New Testament is a covenant: a legal document. It assigns the inheritance to God's adopted sons (John 1:12). The boundaries of this nation of nations in principle are the whole earth. Though sin will restrict a perfect working out in history of these boundaries, the goal of Christians all over the world should be to work toward this goal: the creation of a formally covenanted confederation of Christian nations under God. God's kingdom must triumph in history over Satan's kingdom. Christ's nation of nations must triumph over Satan's empire of empires.

Some critics may complain that I am calling for international theocracy. They are correct, for this international theocracy is exactly what the Bible requires.

Baldwin criticizes the "Religious Right" for grovelling before President Bush and the Republicans. From whom is Baldwin seeking approval?

Eventually the concept of "national sovereignty" will be abandoned. The sooner the better.

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