I earned my law degree at one of the very few authentically Christian law schools in America, Trinity Law School in Santa Ana, CA. It was actually named Simon Greenleaf University (SGU) when I started in 2005, but merged with Trinity Evangelical Divinity School half-way through my 4-year program. Simon Greenleaf, a professor of law at Harvard in the early 1800s (when it was still a staunchly Christian institution) was the nation’s foremost expert on the laws of evidence, and wrote a landmark work of Christian apologetics titled The Testimony of the Evangelists proving the absolute trustworthiness of the Gospel by subjecting its claims to the same standards of proof used in courts of law.
The university that bore his name operated as three separate but interrelated colleges: law, apologetics and human rights. I availed myself of all three programs, graduating Magna Cum Laude in law, earning a Certificate’ in International Human Rights in 1997 at an SGU summer program in Strasbourg, France (in conjunction with the International Institute of Human Rights loosely affiliated with the United Nations), and learning the essentials of Christian apologetics (the defense of the Bible) to enhance my work (since the late 1980s) as a Christian social and political activist.
I offer these facts not for self-aggrandizement, but in self-defense, because for thirty years my enemies on the political left have used their considerable power to assassinate my character and portray me a social pariah – or as one LGBT-activist federal judge in an obscenely malicious faux ruling put it – “a crackpot bigot.” After years of ignoring them, in the belief I had been raised with that “people should never tout their own accomplishments but let others do it for them,” I finally realized that idealistic axiom doesn’t apply in the context of Marxist smear-mongering, which is specifically designed to strike crippling fear into all who witness the assassination of your character, so that on one dares to defend you. So now I fight back by unapologetically highlighting all of the gifts, skills, experiences, accomplishments and credentials God has blessed me with and giving Him all the glory.
Ironically, taking this path of righteous defiance (instead of compromise) liberated me from the fear of “what other people think” and gave me special insight in what Jesus meant when He promised true freedom in Him. Freedom from the expectations of men is a empowering “bonus” dimension of Christian liberty. Being able to calmly, rationally and persistently speak plain truth in the face of vicious mockery and slander from the world is (behind prayer) the most powerful weapon we have in the culture war.
It was also a pathway to understanding the lost doctrine of Christian sovereignty, which I first learned at SGU in my studies of law as understood by America’s Founders. That biblical worldview is a perspective you cannot find in secular, or secularized “Christian” law schools, because it contradicts the Marxist revisionism that began flooding legal education in the late 1800s.
When Abraham Lincoln pursued a legal career that process meant studying the Bible and Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (which reads more like Christian sermons than much of the humanist drivel heard from many mainstream church pulpits today). What is called “Stare Decisis” or “settled law” binding on lower courts, today means whatever the higher courts have ruled in their own human wisdom, but originally all judges were presumed to be duty-bound to seek God’s guidance in matters before the court, and since His view is perfect and unchanging, those matters were fully settled for all subsequent cases with substantially identical circumstances. Both approaches accepted that a judge could be wrong in motive or reasoning, but only in the God-honoring system was the standard of measurement (the Bible) a fixed constant for corrections. Now we have no standards but the personal ethics, if any, of the black robed tyrants who rule over us with often-blatant political bias.
The Doctrine of Christian Sovereignty holds that the Christian church is a separate sphere of human society from the sphere of government with separate but equal authority in human affairs. The doctrine is implicit in the Bible in such concepts as “kings and priests,” the “sanctuary cities” of the Levites, and Jesus’ exposition of the law regarding taxation (giving unto Caesar what is his, but not what is God’s). It is also easily recognized in the history of Christian civilization, most pointedly in the emphasis on church freedom from government control being the First Principle of human rights in both the Magna Carta of 1215 and the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution, but also in our legal system which even to this day has two parts: the Court of Law (of “Kings,” enforcing the rules made by government) and the Court of Equity (of “Priests,” enforcing the Christian ethics of justice and fairness as defined in the “common law”).
It is also implicit in Jefferson’s metaphor “the separation of church and state” which has been deliberately misinterpreted in corrupt rulings by the US Supreme Court since Everson v Board of Education in 1947 to forbid church influence in government. In actuality, the original metaphor means the “coadjuvancy” of church and state, i.e. the co-administration of society by the separate but equal sovereigns of church and state – which was why Christian prayer in the public schools was (and remains) fully constitutional until it was illegally banned by the Secular Humanist usurpers in 1963, and why the national motto “In God We Trust” remains on our currency (for now).
I have been working for years to challenge the American church to reclaim its sovereignty, the loss of which is best recognized in the capitulation to secular government dominance in the form of “mandatory” incorporation as 501(c)(3) entities. Congregations were never intended to be corporations, and the shocking collapse of Christendom into humanism-defiled theology and “social justice” activism is the direct, predictable consequence. Our collective capitulation to this mentality is nothing less than religious serfdom.
My First Century Bible Church refuses to surrender its sovereignty regarding government registration, church stewardship in all spheres of human life, including business and politics, and the sovereign control we Christians have over our own bodies relative to “vaccines” and other public health mandates. I’m challenging all like-minded remnant Christians to follow our lead and work diligently to restore the doctrine of Christian sovereignty in all of our churches.
