Impulsar la conectividad digital

The totalitarian state, as we have noted, wages war against the community, because the community is a powerful rival government. It works to weaken the community, the family, church, and vocation in order to strengthen its own power.

Every community exercises government and coercion. If a community is hostile to a particular race, the coercion of its hostility and neglect is very real. Of one town in California, a particularly beautiful one in buildings and setting, and made up of the people of a small north European country, one woman, who lived there two or three years, remarked: “It was a miserable place to be. I was an outsider, and they wanted to keep the town set in their old country ways.” In a variety of other ways, every community exercises coercion against outsiders and on its members. This coercion can be for healthy reasons, or for narrow-minded causes, but it is still a very real government. The state, as it interferes with the one, also harms the other. By striking at the community’s weaknesses, it also limits and undercuts its strength. The state, moreover, is no more immune to sins and shortcomings than the community, but its faults work a more extensive and pervasive harm.

The state lacks a great virtue and strength which the family and the community possess. We belong to a family, and we belong to a community: we do not join it. We are, on the other hand, citizens of a state, and we can move from one country to another and change our citizenship by law. Belonging is not a matter of law; joining is. Thus, as the state weakens every form and aspect of the community, it renders people rootless and atomistic. In the process, people also become more impersonal and more intolerant in fact, however tolerant by state law. People will tolerate in members of their family what they will never tolerate in a fellow citizen, because they belong together. Similarly, in a true community there is mutual forebearance and patience one with another.

Moreover, the more oppressive the state becomes toward a community, the more readily an illicit community arises. This illicit community then begins to govern society. The state having become no more than a band of robbers, to use Augustine’s term, the only competing social orders become other and independent criminal bands. In one tyrant, anarchic, and/or oppressive state after another, criminal and secret societies have become the effectual governments. The Vehengericht of Germany from the twelfth into the nineteenth century, the Chinese secret societies, the Mafia, and other societies are examples of such criminal communities which take over large segments of government. The criminal group recognizes what the state refuses to admit, namely, that community is life and power on the human level, and the means to effectual power is the control of the community. The state wishes to suppress and destroy the community; the criminal group seeks to control the community. As a result, the criminal gains power faster than the state does, because the criminal group seeks to be a parasite on community rather than its destroyer. The criminal community becomes the effective community and infiltrates the state as well as society at large. I have heard businessmen say that they prefer to deal with the criminal syndicate rather than with the civil government, because survival is easier with the criminal syndicate.

Because the state works to destroy the family, which is the mainspring of community life, it destroys the peace of the community. It creates a fearful and unstable people. As St. Augustine observed, “If, then, home, the natural refuge from the ills of life, is itself not safe, what shall we say of the city, which, as it is larger, is so much the more filled with lawsuits civil and criminal, and is never free from the fear, if sometimes from the actual outbreak of disturbing and bloody insurrections and civil wars?”115

The destruction of community is furthered when revolutionary political groups become criminal groups, robbing banks, bombing buildings and groups, murdering, kidnapping, and creating social disorders to increase social chaos. The criminal society is a parasitic community, one which exists to control and prey on the normal and legitimate community. The revolutionary group is out to destroy the community in order to create a new state, so that its activities, while criminal, have a different function than the activities of purely criminal groups.

The revolutionists and the statists thus have a common cause, to destroy society, to wipe out community. It is important to understand the reasons for this. Men have tried over and over again to establish a community on the basis of blood. Modern attempts to do so include the national states, Nazi Germany, the Arab states, and Israel. Others have extended this racist idea of community to include all men, a one-world order. All men, it is pointed out, are a common species and hence should live together in community. A widely promoted book of a few years ago was titled The Family of Man, a deliberate appeal to the unity of the family in blood as the ground for the same unity of all men as one in blood. The result is that not only does this faith seek to incorporate the family tie into the new “family,” humanity, but also to alter religion into the brotherhood of man, into the religion of humanity.

Of this movement Gerardus van der Leeuw observed:

This “religion of humanity,” however, has enjoyed scarcely any cult development in our secularized era; all the more powerfully, nonetheless, does the magic of humanity still operate: it is the sole entity worthy of worship that remained to thousands after the fierce conflagration of potencies in the nineteenth century. At one time virtuous, as for the age of enlightment:

He who delights not in such teachings Deserves not to be a man. (The Magic Flute) At another time, realistically, as in Goethe’s sense:

For all human failings Pure humanity atones:

again, romantically: every mother a Virgin Mary: then as “reverence for life”: it has persisted to our time, especially in its woes. And there, at long last, it found cult forms also. Under the Arc de triomphe de l’Etoile burns the eternal flame

from the grave of the Unknown Soldier who, in his anonymity, represents the whole of vast suffering humanity, and before whom the nations bow.

Humanity then is the sole community that can vie with the church in catholicity. But it lacks the Head which constitutes the church a living organism; nor has it any mission. And it is precisely in its mission that the paradoxical character of the church is revealed: the given people, which simultaneously is the spiritual community never existent in fact—the community that both is and is not—that is the church, and it embraces the world. On the other hand, humanity is far too existent: we all belong to it, and for us there remain no possibilities. This is the poverty of humanity as community.116

Even more than poverty, however, the fact of the Fall divides humanity. Not only are there divisions between criminal and law-abiding groups, but also deep rifts between law-abiding groups which are beyond reconciliation in too many cases. The rationalist holds that all these problems are soluble; in reality, man being more than reason, they are not, and the rationalist only introduces a further division. Thus, however intensely the national state and the one-worlder try to create a unified human community in terms of blood, these attempts are failure. Instead of a unified society, there is a divided one which continues to fractionalize.

The solution then becomes the abolition of community and its replacement by the state. Since men on their own cannot create community or maintain it, then society must be abolished. All free associations and all natural communities (the family, the tribe, the clan, etc.), as well as all supernatural communities (the church and Christian covenantal associations) must be outlawed or suppressed in order to prevent the fractionalizing of humanity. The state then requires conformity; it educates all into a common faith in man (national man or world-man), and it provides unity by means of coercive laws.

Since there is no church in other religions, the revolutionary program of the state and of revolutionists becomes easier to put into effect. The church as the body of Christ, the covenanted community whose life is given by sovereign and electing grace, is both a natural and a supernatural community. It is the instrument of the new Adam, who is the new head of the new natural order, and the church is thus a natural institution; it is also supernatural, because it is ordained and called into being by God. Its “destruction” thus is unlike the destruction of tribal groups: its life is beyond the reach of the state.

The death of community, natural and supernatural, is the goal of the state. But to destroy or work to destroy the family, the church, the Christian school, private associations, free vocations, and other aspects of society is a flagrant injustice, and for the state to dedicate itself to injustice means that the state thereby becomes an antinomian body. In the name of law, it legislates anti- law. It substitutes relativistic laws and bureaucratic fiats for justice, and thus works against law as justice. The courts become organized instruments of injustice, and, instead of becoming the allies of justice and just men, the courts become progressively the instruments of the criminal community. The criminal groups cannot exist without the connivance and cooperation of the

state, and the two enter into a working alliance which, despite their mutual distrust, functions very well, because both exist in enmity to justice and godly community. Both have a vested interest in insisting that all men are larcenous at heart, and the only practical way to live is in terms of their theory. The statist holds that men cannot be good unless the state compels them, and goodness is then defined as what the state and its planners ordain. The criminal society insists that all men are crooks at heart, but that their activity is an honest attempt to provide realistically what men desire. Without affirming the doctrine of the Fall, and usually denying it, in practice both statists and criminals presuppose the Fall. Even more, they assume that there is no remedy for the Fall except to live in terms of it. Ultimately, this means that every man becomes his own god, determining good and evil for himself (Gen. 3:5), and the practical consequence is anarchy.

In the community of the atonement, the situation is radically different. In Deuteronomy 21:1-9, we see clearly what such a society implies:

If one be found slain in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee to possess it, lying in the field, and it be not known who hath slain him: Then thy elders and thy judges shall come forth, and they shall measure unto the cities which are round about him that is slain: And it shall be, that the city which is next unto the slain man, even the elders of that city shall take an heifer, which hath not been wrought with, and which hath not drawn in the yoke; And the elders of that city shall bring down the heifer unto a rough valley, which is neither eared nor sown, and shall strike off the heifer’s neck there in the valley: And the priests the sons of Levi shall come near; for them the LORD thy God hath chosen to minister unto him, and to bless in the name of the LORD; and by their word shall every controversy and every stroke be tried: And all the elders of that city, that are next unto the slain man, shall wash their hands over the heifer that is beheaded in the valley: And they shall answer and say, Our hands have not shed this blood, neither have our eyes seen it. Be merciful, O LORD, unto thy people Israel, whom thou hast redeemed, and lay not innocent blood unto thy people of Israel’s charge. And the blood shall be forgiven them. So shalt thou put away the guilt of innocent blood from among you, when thou shalt do that which is right in the sight of the Lord.

In the community of the atonement all crime must be atoned for. Every crime, every sin, is an offense primarily against God’s order, secondarily against man and the natural order. As a result, any crime which is unsolved requires restitution and must be dealt with. Since this is case law, murder is selected as an instance which requires God-ward attention, in a particularly important way, in that life, the creation and gift of God, is that which all sin mars and finally destroys. If in a town or city, that town or city must make atonement for it. If in a field, the nearest town or city is responsible. Restitution must be made by the community where the criminal is unknown, because in every case of crime, there must be restitution. Thus, for the unknown murderer, a substitute is provided, a heifer, to be executed in the murderer’s stead. The community provides the heifer, and the community assumes the normal liabilities for restitution as required in Exodus 21. Whether it be theft, murder, or any other crime, the community of the atonement removes from itself the guilt for the offense only by, first, apprehending the guilty man and requiring

restitution, or, second, where the guilty man cannot be apprehended, the community makes restitution.

In either case, a criminal community cannot be allowed to exist. In terms of biblical law, the habitual criminal must be executed, as well as the incorrigible delinquent (Deut. 21:18-21). The community of the atonement cannot tolerate habitual criminals, nor subsidize them by a prison system.

Similarly, the community of the atonement must be at war with the modern state and its antinomian law. It must declare such a state to be anti-Christian and lawless. It must work to bring men to the knowledge of the regenerating God and His son, Jesus Christ, and then to establish in every area the power of the godly community.

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