So, towards explaining my post on November 27th, I want to briefly discuss a certain contingency which I ignored.

Imagine a world where nations are defined entirely without concern for the land they occupy, but only by their ideology or religion. So, the "atheist state" takes up random splotches of land around the world based on wherever the atheists live, as does the "Islamic state", the "Christian state", the "Buddhist state", etc..Due to the violent nature of certain ideologies, it's natural that said groups may eventually band into neighboring regions for safety, etc..

Justice in this system is executed by each community, which puts the world in a very difficult position. What if a member of Isis steals from a member of the Christian theocracy? Do we chop of the thief's hand as they do in Isis, or make him repay 7 times as the Bible prescribes?

Furthermore, certain groups may employ a consequence for apostasy, such as the LDS tradition that an apostate cannot rejoin, or the ISIS tradition that an apostate gets do die, or the atheist tradition that an apostate gets mocked; joining such a group, therefore, comes with the understanding that said contingency exists. There is no civil penalty for leaving Christianity except loss of citizenship. However, there is the death penalty for leaving a Christian Theocracy and then attempting to proselytize other Christians to follow after false gods (Deut 13 -- I guess if you think about it in terms where all life is created to please God, God is king, and Christianity leads to eternal heaven then counter-proselytism is treason, attempted eternal murder, and a crime against humanity).

Lastly, suppose a person claims to be a part of an ideology containing no penalties for anything. By what standard is he punished for any crime against anyone?

These questions are all interesting to think about, but the answer is really not complicated. In my suggestions, I did not advocate a plurality of justice systems. I advocated Christianity.

The above really seems like a cop-out, enabling me to avoid answering the more difficult question about the reality of our current global economy: "how can we all get along when we have differing views about justice?". The answer is, "the only way to do this is to compromise".

Someone might say, "but Zac, we've had peace and freedom of religion for years in the U.S., with a Christian majority. Why change?" Right. Let's think about this. The states were established with laws that are based on the OT system. We can all thank Presbyterians for things like separation of powers, a judicial articulation of God given rights, and trial by a jury of our peers. However, for some reason these Christian law makers only modeled their system on scripture, and didn't use the scripture directly as their law book. Nonetheless, if you check old court records, you can see judges deferring to the scripture when they made their rulings. This is something I don't understand. If they were willing to establish a state which is not strictly scriptural, then how did they know which circumstances merited deferring to scripture? I can only imagine that they simply did it whenever it was convenient. Isn't that a compromise of values? I wish someone would explain this to me.

Before I proceed, I'd like to state an optimistic premise that all laws are conceived to protect people from immoral practices, whether directly or indirectly. In America, we have laws to protect people from theft, murder, rape, etc., and we have laws designed to maintain the system which carries out those laws. So, all laws are eventually built on moral considerations. So, a legal compromise is a moral compromise. This is Biblical, as Paul says, "I would not have known what it was to covet if the law did not say 'you shall not covet.'"

Christians, I ask you, where in the Bible does it give even the slightest bit of room for us to compromise morally (or legally, if my premise was rejected)?

Now, let's bring it full circle. How would we penalize someone who commits a crime against a Christian? We penalize him according to Christian law, and offer him protection from injustice perpetrated by an external legal system. He may choose to return for his home penalty or not. How would we penalize a Christian who commits a crime against a nonChristian? In the same way: according to Christian law. (Lev 19:33-34, 24:22)

So how can we all get along when we have differing views of justice? Christians, I don't think we can.

What is the implication of this? Do we go to war with the whole world at once? No! We preach the gospel. And, in any place where we have a high enough concentration of God fearing people to make this actually happen, let's establish righteous Biblical law there.

OK, so what about the law of the land? Well, if we can actually establish a Christian legal system somewhere, then let Christians not file a lawsuit by means of the unjust laws of the world. If we do that, we're hiring foreigners to do injustice to our brothers.

Finally, I think I need to fully qualify a statement I made in my 11/27 post. I said, "The execution of unjust law on an unwilling people is tyranny." In the context, it may seem that I was referring to laws which were perceived unjust by those people, and as an appeal to nonChristians it may as well have been so. However, I am convinced that the opinions held by men about justice or injustice hold no truth or value except as much as they coincide with scripture. In whatever part they do not coincide with scripture, they serve only as witness against the purveyors of those opinions, which is why we must all be washed by Christ's blood so that our sins will not be held against us. So, as to my statement, I meant "unjust law" in the actual sense, not the arbitrary sense.

"I want you to sign off on these."