THE FIRST WORD
THE SECOND WORD
THE THIRD WORD
THE FOURTH WORD
THE FIFTH WORD
THE SIXTH WORD
THE SEVENTH WORD
THE EIGHTH WORD
THE NINTH WORD
THE TENTH WORD
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.
Though the tenth word is essentially a recapitulation of all the foregoing commands of the second table, among the aspects of this law which are overlooked or otherwise denounced in the liberalized churches is its foremost thrust: that which belongs to my neighbor does not belong to me and there is no justification to yearn for, devise, or otherwise justify means to make it otherwise. If it does not mean this, it means nothing.
But it [the tenth word] describes not merely the emotion of coveting but also includes the attempt to attach something to oneself illegally. . . . The term “house” can in a narrow and special sense describe the dwelling-place, primarily the built house but also in every case the tent-“house” of the nomad; it can, however, also be used in a more or less wide or transferred sense to mean, for instance, the family.1
Yet, under the Alienist spirit which pervades at present – not by open contest or debate, but by subversion, arbitrary force, and psychological programming – the seminal and conspicuous meaning of this law is the very thing now roundly condemned for ‘the heresy of racism’! Because the whole animating spirit of Alienism is a denial of limited jurisdictions, maintenance of boundaries, and distinctions between clans and the God-ordained unequal possessions of all kinship units, large and small.
The catechism is unequivocal here. The duties required in the tenth word include ‘full contentment with our own condition,’ (question #147), which is to say that my family’s condition necessarily differs from those of other lines in manifold ways, and we should never begrudge another heritage their strengths, nor their rightful possessions, even when they differ from or exceed our own. But so-called “Civil Rights” (government-created minority privileges meant to trump the White Man’s God-given rights) fly in the face of this law. As such, Affirmative Action quotas, social advancement, anti-discrimination policies in housing and business, ongoing “reparations” via the hydra-like apparata of the welfare state (with manifold race-based benefits for minorities), and the illegal fourteenth amendment back of it all are aught but the diametric and institutional inversion of the tenth commandment; for all those revolutionary policies are established firmly upon the covetousness of non-Whites – Blacks and Jews, signally – toward their White neighbors. It is a policy of holistic civilizational larceny predicated on the institutionalization of what JFK called ‘covert means.’2
Rather than upholding property rights and hallowing boundaries between peoples, and rebuking revolutionary ideologies as the catechism insists we ought, the leveling ethos (Marxian, Jacobin, and Gnostic) is now esteemed in the subverted churches as a law above the law. Alienism actually makes a sublime virtue of violating the tenth word. So much so that their usual refrains are things like “equality is the fruit of the gospel,” “physical kinship is carnal and has been abolished in Christ,” and even, “race-mixing is the gospel.” They issue these blasphemous aphorisms with such hubris and contempt of all property, identity, and jurisdiction because their controlling hermeneutic – “the church is your TRUE family and physical relation is meaningless,” predicated upon a misreading of Gal. 3:28 – compels them to invert the law.
If things forbidden in the tenth word include “discontentment with our own estate; envying and grieving at the good of our neighbor, together with all inordinate motions and affections to anything that is his” (WLC #148), it means different clans have differing claims on property and different rights in regard to those jurisdictions, just as the tribes of Israel did, and so too with the Hebrew ethnicity altogether. So it was in the Christian era – especially after the fall of Rome – that the nations discipled to Christ observed the tenth word, as well as the eighth, as establishing the property rights both in principle and in fact. And thus feudalism under God’s law came to reassert the nationalism previously infringed by the empire.
In terms of the American nation, the tenth word proscribed any and all ideological pretexts to confusion of what belongs to whom. This very much shaped our founding documents, which specify that ours was a republic founded for ‘ourselves and our posterity’ (U.S. Constitution Preamble), permitting only ‘free white persons of good character’ (Naturalization Act of 1790).
The Black’s demand of citizenship and the Abolitionist’s encouragement in the pursuit of that usurpation were covetousness of the greatest magnitude. The Jacobin imaginings of propositional nationhood codified in the 14th amendment were couched definitively in covetousness for our children’s very birthright, and all the benefits thereof. Clearly, if we are commanded to ‘covet nothing that is my neighbor’s,’ it includes all the desiderata being extorted from us on the part of alien peoples: argument for the full inclusion in our body politic of a strange people violates the law outright.
Yes, while Israel had one law for the native and the alien alike (Ex. 12:49), it clearly did not erase the legal distinction between the two categories because the law itself depends upon the legitimate existence of each in order for the law to be intelligible. Clearly, all such passages, then, are a notice of jurisdiction: the alien was bound to honor the law of Israel and had no claim to diplomatic immunity nor ignorance of the law. Countervailing this principle of one law for native and stranger, the Scripture nonetheless stipulates many inequalities in law between them, such as the fact that alien peoples sojourning in the borders of Israel could not own land (Lev. 25), could not ascend to leadership (Deut. 1:13; 17:15), could, per the words of Luther’s translation, “not enter the body politic” (Deut. 23:2), and had no standing in court apart from paternalistic bondservice to an Israelite (Ex. 20:10; Deut. 1:16).
Meantime, the law also specified that while Israelites could not lend to kinsmen at interest, they could so lend to alien peoples in their midst (Deut. 23:20), and though Israelites could maintain a stable of slaves from their own race, the term of their slavery was seven years by law, while interminable chattel slavery was restricted to alien races bought with money (Lev. 25:44-46). However, the law stipulates that the alien in Israel had no reciprocal right to take Israelites for perpetual slaves; and even those Israelites who sold themselves to aliens under the seven-year term of bondservice had a special immunity mandating that they could be redeemed from their service by a kinsman at any time (Lev. 25:47-55). All of these overt inequalities between native and alien in law the Scripture regards as equity. In fact, this inequality the text calls “liberty to all the inhabitants of the land” (Lev. 25:10). It can do so because the modern Alienist notion of liberty is entirely false. Equality is not liberty. On the contrary, genuine liberty entirely requires inequality: privileges and immunities are implicit in the very institution of the family, and the family cannot be understood apart from them. So too with nation and race.
Inasmuch as we should countenance no ideologies which propose to legitimate covetousness in ourselves, neither shall we do so in others toward ourselves, nor even in others toward third parties apart from us. To do so is plainly antinomian.
The bane of communism, socialism, capitalism, propositionalism, civil rights, human rights, and all other leveling ideologies, the tenth word presupposes the legitimacy of privilege, hierarchy, aristocracy, segregation, private property, association, clan, and heredity. There is no escaping it. To love thy neighbor as thyself is to never begrudge him the privileges and immunities appropriate to him in his hereditary domain.
For all its sophistic mummery, Alienism is a repudiation of the tenth word in its every dimension. I mean, let’s be realistic: the tenth law directly sanctions domestic slavery – a thing ubiquitously decried by Alienists as ‘the greatest evil in American history’ – a la reference to manservants and maidservants as things belonging to our neighbors. And yet, there it is, entwined inextricably in God’s very law. The law’s enumeration of slaves as domestic possessions simply crushes all pretensions of Abolitionism.
Since the commandment in question deals particularly with a state of mind (covetousness), it anathematizes all leveling ideologies directly. Yes, by prohibition of covetous thoughts, it outlaws all such philosophies as deny the legitimate boundaries, possessions, privileges and immunities of property vested in kinship groups such as the clan. Yes, popular as it may be in recent years, Alienism is directly anathematized by the tenth word.
As with all other points of the Decalogue, the tenth word can only be understood and reasonably accounted for in terms of traditional Calvinistic-Theonomic-
My writing of this piece brings to mind the PCA’s General Assembly of 2015, wherein the denomination founded in fundamental opposition to Marxism and racial integration sat in proverbial sackcloth and ashes denouncing the foundational principles of their own denomination as heretical, and by mute implication, their founders as heretics. This grand theological revolution comes exactly astride of the secular revolution which is presently purging all symbols of traditional Christian sentiment – especially things related to the Confederacy, the American founding, and European civilization – from both public and private acknowledgement. And for exactly the same reasons. Equal parts convenience and hypocrisy, but all sacrilege, this quorum announced the PCA’s official adoption of a new religion to replace the old ‘racist’ faith of our fathers.
Remarkably, this explicit repudiation of their own heritage does not prevent these men from pretending to affirm a time-tested and ancient faith. Just as they rotely cite the Decalogue while deaf to its conspicuous meanings and implications, they drop citations from the venerable dead like unwanted pennies, but those references only rebuke them. They deny the existence of Kinism – which they insist is ‘racism’ – in the history of Christian thought as they simultaneously convene to denounce the founders of all our Reformed denominations for the high crime of ‘racism’.
Yes, in the fourth century Augustine spoke not merely of all mankind but of “the Hebrew race,” “the race of Israel,” “the race called the Philistines,” “monstrous races,” “the race of David,” “the race of the Roman people,” “men of Greek race,” “a foreign race,” and “the people of God [as] composed of every race of men.”3 Far from Augustine was the babble of “only one race, the human race.”
Fast-forward to 1993, when Carl F. Henry, among others, produced a joint resolution on Christian government containing these words:
God’s Law and the Nations: We affirm . . . that God’s moral law has applicability to all people and nations. . . .
We deny that . . . diversity and tolerance should be imposed by laws or regulations enforcing political correctness or multiculturalism.4
Ethnonationalism was, at that time, at least in conservative circles, still taken for granted as the Christian world order. The ersatz orthodoxy as it is held now – the idea that the gospel has abolished the nations and that the law prohibits limited filial associations and tribal jurisdictions – was apparently disregarded by Greg Bahnsen, too, when he penned what is arguably his magnum opus, Theonomy in Christian Ethics:
The law itself is blessed, and obedience to it brings great blessing for that people who honor God by heeding His commandments. When the law is ignored by a nation, then justice is perverted and wickedness abounds (Hab. 1:4). By contrast, an abundant, prosperous and holy people is the goal of a God-directed state (cf. Prov. 14:28-35). “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people” (Prov. 14:34). . . . There are great national blessings for that society which follows the moral directives of God. . . . A nation will receive a blessing or curse from God’s law based on their obedience or disobedience thereof (Deut. 11:26 ff.). The book of the law is emphatic that the Lord will greatly bless a nation for careful obedience to all His commandments (Deut. 15:4 f.). If a nation will respond properly to God’s prescriptive will, then the law will not bring death, evil and a curse upon them, but rather it will promote their life, blessing and good (Deut. 30:15, 19). If a nation keeps the commandments and statutes of God, He will love them, bless them, and multiply their children, crops, and herds; furthermore there will be no barrenness or sickness among them (Deut. 7:12-15). The nation which hearkens to God’s commands will be prospered . . . (Deut. 11:13-15). If the nation obeys all of God’s law it will be exalted with blessed cities, fields, children, crops, herds, rain, labor and economy (Deut. 28:1 ff.). If the nation hearkens to God’s commandments and statutes in the book of the law with their whole heart God will bless their labor, procreation, crops, and herds (Deut. 30:6-10). If a nation will walk in God’s law, then it will have . . . fruitful multiplication . . . (Lev. 26:3-13). . . .
God is faithful to His word and will abundantly bless that nation which honors Him and His law. To refuse to be blessed by God, saying, “No! there will be no such blessing before we reach heaven!’ is manifestly absurd; it represents pessimistic recalcitrance. Why should a people refuse to be blessed? . . . To some degree the blessings which accrue to a nation which obeys God’s law are a foretaste of the heavenly kingdom.5
Bahnsen took for granted the existence of a multiplicity of Christian nations, individually covenanted to God after the pattern of national Israel. And more recently still, Wyngaarden has affirmed the same:
More than a dozen excellent commentaries could be mentioned that all interpret Israel as thus inclusive of Jew and Gentile, in this verse, — the Gentile adherents thus being merged with the covenant people of Israel, though each nationality remains distinct.
This abiding distinction of the nationalities is also clearly implied by Isaiah. For, though Israel is frequently called Jehovah’s People, the work of his hands, his inheritance, yet these three epithets severally are applied not only to Israel, but also to Assyria and to Egypt: “Blessed be Egypt, my people, and Assyria, the work of my hands, and Israel, mine inheritance.” 19:25.
Thus the highest description of Jehovah’s covenant people is applied to Egypt, — “my people,” — showing that the Gentiles will share the covenant blessings, not less than Israel. Yet the several nationalities are here kept distinct, even when Gentiles share, in the covenant blessing, on a level of equality with Israel. Egypt, Assyria and Israel are not nationally merged. And the same principle, that nationalities are not obliterated, by membership in the covenant, applies, of course, also in the New Testament dispensation.6
Simply put, the scriptural witness is clear that “all peoples (races), nations (ethnicities), and languages should serve Him” (Dan. 7:14). Or as Strawbridge once adroitly argued,
The [Great] Commission to disciple and baptize nations, in the Biblical thematic development stands upon the very early division of the nations. In Biblical usage, the term “nations” is equal to “all the families of the earth” (Gen. 12:3, 28:14, Acts 3:25; cf. Ps. 22:). Moreover, in a Biblical survey of the term “nations,” the terms “family” and “house” or “household” are explicitly and organically connected. For example, in the book that defines the beginning of family and nation, Genesis, “nations” is equal to “families.”7
A man can never be considered in abstraction from what he is. To hold that we can discount a man’s race, heritage, intelligence, religion, and moral character, and then somehow deal with the real man is a common liberal fallacy; the result is only an abstract idea of a man, not a living man.8
Far from a dispensable category or dismissible artifact, nationhood, contiguous as it is with the physical clan, is the relation ordained of God between man and man and between man and God. For the Scripture describes God’s covenantal interaction with men in terms of their lineage, redemption, or reprobation house by house, nation by nation, and race by race. Apart from these realities, man is an anarchist without law.
The Ten Words, similarly consonant with the Scripture overall, cannot be made sense of inside an Alienist frame of reference. For Alienism denies the lawfulness and/or existence of all the essential categories and entities taken for granted therein as legitimate and real. This is why the Alienist vision of Christendom never obtained anywhere in Christendom past: if Alienism were the true Christian view, there would be some multicult imperial country on earth called Christiana where all the races were fused into a mocha blend from the beginning of the Christian era to present. But no such place exists. Nor did anything resembling it ever rise in covenanted lands until and where Jacobin-Marxism aggressively supplanted Christianity.
Before that, Christendom insisted upon and persisted as ethno-nations. Because we believed in God’s law.
- Martin Noth, Exodus, p. 166 ↩
- JFK’s speech from 4/27/61 ↩
- Augustine, City of God, Book XV, ch. 8; Book XVI, chs. 2, 3, 8; Book XVII, ch. 7; Book XVIII, chs. 13, 18, 45; Book XX, ch. 21 ↩
- Carl F.H. Henry, “A Summary Statement of the Consultation of Theology and Civil Law,” qtd. in H. Wayne House, The Christian and American Law, pp. 289, 290 ↩
- Greg Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics, 3rd ed., pp. 468-470 ↩
- Martin J. Wyngaarden, The Future of the Kingdom in Prophecy and Fulfillment: A Study of the Scope of “Spiritualization” in Scripture (2008), p. 101f. ↩
- Gregg Strawbridge, “The Grandness of the Great Commission” ↩
- R.J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law, p. 434 ↩