Another False Witness

It may not have all the glamour of the Duke lacrosse team case, but a 17-year-old girl who should be named, not given anonymity because of her age, destroyed the life of a Bradford taxi driver.

He lost his livelihood and his house and his reputation. She will spend two months in detention.

I’m afraid I have to go with Deuteronomy 19:16-19 again on this one.

Duke, Knoxville, and Justice

The Duke rape hoax scandal has barely been mentioned by the media here. I knew about it from the Internet before I went to the States, where it was big news. It became even bigger news when it was finally brought out in the open that District Attorney Michael B. Nifong had committed crimes worthy of disbarrment and prison to use the case for political ends.

I will add my voice to those who think he should be strung up for intentionally destroying the lives of those students. Their accuser, Crystal Gail Mangum, ought to be awfully glad that Deuteronomy 19:16-19 isn’t the law of the land, even though it would be justly applied in this case. It should equally apply to Mr Nifong. (Any anti-theonomists are invited to dispute this.) A profile of Ms Mangum is available from The American Daily.

With an audacity usually reserved to British Labour Party politicians, Nifong refuses to resign in these circumstances.

I have to give a H/T to the Grit, who made me aware of the gruesome killings of Channon Christian and Chris Newsom, which by contrast made no news outside of the Knoxville area because the story involved the wrong racial balance between perpetrator and victim. The Conservative Voice article to which he links further exposes the bias evident in the MSM, and particularly that useless pretentious rag, The New York Times.

I’d support a theonomic response in the Knoxville case as well.

Rushdoony Confused

As I have continued to peruse R. J. Rushdoony’s The Foundations of Social Order: Studies in the Creeds and Councils of the Early Church, I find that I have less and less in common with some of his theological ideas.

As I suggested I would do, I read the chapter on Iconodulism. He starts off my rejecting monasticism. What the Fathers saw as asceticism, Rushdoony sees as neoplatonism. Then he says is veers from monism to semi-Manachaeanism. Even though monasticism far pre-dates the Council of Chalcedon, he sees it as opposed to Chalcedonian theology. He is stuck on the false premise that monastics see in themselves the potential to partake of the essence of God rather than in His energies.

He admits that the iconoclastic emperors were Monophysite heretics and those who restored the icons were orthodox. But since the emperors and the state could be venerated by the use of pictures and symbols (just as it is today), he says the iconodules implicitly confused the two natures of Christ. Then he flip-flops and acknowledges the validity of the concilliar decree,

If the Incarnation is real, it can be portrayed; an unreal incarnation, one that is “merely phantastic,” cannot be depicted. Put in modern terms a true and real Christ can be photographed; a mythical one cannot. The second point is equally valid. Honor paid to the portrait is honor paid to the one portrayed.

Surely that wouldn’t sit well will some of his Truly Reformed brethren who see the Jesus film (and I would assume The Passion of the Christ) as a violation of the Second Commandment.

I can’t help but get the impression, especially as I have now read this chapter several times, that he knows where he wants to go with his point, so he stretches and bends things to get him there. He has a presupposition against iconodulism and he is looking to find the justification for his views. Thus he finishes the chapter by going back and attacking asceticism and particularly the hesychasm of St Gregory Palamas, who he never mentions by name, but rather refers approvingly to the opposition of Barlaam of Calabria.

This is despite the fact the iconoclast controversy pre-dates the hesychasm controversy by 550 years.

Rushdoony can never say anything more against the veneration of icons than that somehow it is tainted by association.

Rethinking Reconstructionism

As I noted in the comments to a recent post, I no longer consider myself a Reconstuctionist. As those comboxes and the ones following other posts here and elsewhere make clear, I clearly have more in common with Reconstructionism than with militant secularism. This did seem a good time, however, to dust off an old book.

I’ve started flipping through R. J. Rushdoony’s The Foundations of Social Order: Studies in the Creeds and Councils of the Early Church. After all, the main title is something that seems to be hotly contested here and elsewhere in the blogosphere. The focus indicated in the sub-title is useful because I know a lot more about both the Creeds and the Councils as an Orthodox than I did when I first read the book as a theonomist.