Farewell Common Sense

Written by Dr. Archie P. Jones:

Recently Glenn Beck has rightly been lamenting the death of “common sense” in American government and law—a phenomenon which must be evident to many Americans over forty and manifest to every Bible-believing Christian. Philip K. Howard had complained against massive, hyper-detailed laws generated by regulatory bureaucracies to tell us what we must do in every situation—and leaving nothing to the common sense of the individual—in The Death of Common Sense; How Law Is Suffocating America (1995). . . .

Bureaucratic law, Howard noted, replaced humanity in the replacement of the system of common law which we inherited from England. Bureaucratic rules and regulations seek to predetermine results based on rationalistically conceived principles; the common law applies the law on the basis of the circumstances as evaluated by the common sense of the individual person. The “Progressive Era” at the beginning of the twentieth century saw statutory law begin to replace the common law for purposes of economic regulation; this increased with the economic regulations of the “New Deal” and continued with the increase of federal government bureaucracies added under subsequent administrations. The idea that every situation must be covered by the law has produced an explosion of the size and detail of laws—including those which Congress votes on but never reads. . . .

The death of “Common Sense” was and is caused by modern men’s rejection of God, the Bible, and a Christian view of the world and of life. “Enlightenment” rationalism sought to effectively exclude God from His universe and world (rationalistic Deism which denied God’s divine providence was but one way of doing this), to replace God’s word with man’s unaided reason, to replace God’s divine providence with man’s control of all things through the all-powerful state, and God’s law with man’s laws. . . .

When Western and American law were based mainly on biblical teachings men could know what the law required—and figure out what the law required in a given new situation—because God’s law is not a monstrous, complex, self-contradictory conglomeration of regulations. The common law is a great mass of judicial decisions, but the ethics on which those decisions were based, the ethics which allowed for individual initiative and judgment in novel situations, is derived from biblical law and Christian theories of “natural law. . . .”

Americans no longer have that freedom to use common sense because the church has long abandoned the wholeness of the Great Commission. The church in this country as well as throughout Western Civilization still has virtually abandoned preaching and teaching the whole counsel of God; education; ethical, social, legal, and political thought; and the influencing legal and political institutions. As a result “Common Sense” is dead and Freedom is nearly so.

Read this entire article. . . .

None So Great Or Mighty

John Calvin

Quoting John Calvin:

“For there is no one so great or mighty that he can avoid the misery that will rise up against him when he resists and strives against God.”

“All the blessings we enjoy are Divine deposits, committed to our trust on this condition, that they should be dispensed for the benefit of our neighbors.”

A Christian Founder

Quoting Gary DeMar:

The evidence supporting America’s Christian founding is overwhelming. Those who dispute the claim cannot do it honestly. They must play fast and loose with the facts because the historical evidence is so against them. In an address to the Delaware Chiefs on May 12, 1797, Washington stated: “You do well to wish to learn our arts and ways of life, and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ.”

George Washington stated that “it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor.” He went on in his Thanksgiving Proclamation of October 3, 1789, to write, that as a nation “we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations, and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions.” Just above his signature to the United States Constitution, these words appear: “Done in the Year of our Lord . . . one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven.” This is a direct reference to Jesus Christ. (America’s 200 Year War On Terror, p.11)

Entering The Ark

Written by T. DeWitt Talmage (1832-1902):

“Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them” (Ephesians 4:18)

It seems from what we have recently heard that the Christian religion is a huge blunder; that the Mosaic account of the Creation is an absurdity large enough to throw all nations into rollicking guffaw; that Adam and Eve never existed; that the ancient flood and Noah’s Ark were impossibilities; that there never was a miracle; that the Bible is the friend of cruelty, of murder, of polygamy, of obscenity, of adultery, of all forms of base crime; that the Christian religion is woman’s and man’s stultification; that the Bible from lid to lid is a fable, an obscenity, a cruelty, a humbug, a sham, a lie; that the martyrs who died for its truth were miserable dupes; that the Church of Jesus Christ is properly gazetted as a fool; that when Thomas Carlyle, the sceptic, said, “The Bible is a noble book,” he was dropping into imbecility – that when Theodore Parker, the infidel, declared in Music Hall, Boston, “Never a boy or girl in all Christendom but was profited by that great Book,” he was becoming very weak minded; that it is something to bring a blush to the cheek of every patriot, that John Adams, the father of American independence, declared “The Bible is the best Book in all the world”; and that lion hearted Andrew Jackson turned into a snivelling coward when he said, “That Book, sir, is the rock on which our Republic rests”; and that Daniel Webster abdicated the throne of his intellectual power and resigned his logic, and from being the great expounder of the Constitution and the great lawyer of his age, turned into an idiot, when he said, “My heart assures and reassures me that the Gospel of Jesus Christ must be a divine reality. From the time that at my mother’s feet, or on my father’s knee, I first learned to lisp verses from the sacred Writings, they have been my daily study and vigilant contemplation, and if there is anything in my style or thought to be commended, the credit is due to my kind parents in instilling into my mind an early love of the Scriptures. . . .”