Greg L. Bahnsen

The civil magistrate cannot function without some ethical guidance, without some standard of good and evil. If that standard is not to be the revealed law of God_ then what will it be? In some form or expression it will have to be the law of man (or men) - the standard of self-law or autonomy. And when autonomous laws come to govern a commonwealth, the sword is certainly wielded in vain, for it represents simply the brute force of some men__ will against the will of other men.

With its continued dismissal of the law of God in ethics, Fundamentalism expressed both a "spiritualized" form of situational ethics and a "Christianly submissive" statism.

Of all the wicked heresies and threatening movements facing the church in our day, when Westminster Seminary finally organized their faculty to write something in unison, they gave their determined political efforts not to fight socialism, not to fight homosexuality, not abortion, not crime and mayhem in our society, not subjectivism in theology, not dispensationalism, not cultural relativism, not licentiousness, not defection from the New Testament, not defection from the Westminster Confession of Faith, all of which are out there and they can give their legitimate efforts to_ boy the thing they had to write about was theonomy! How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he doesn__ see the problem?

If no divine law is recognized above the law of the State, then the law of man has become absolute in men's eyes--there is then no logical barrier to totalitarianism.