In “Covenants and Law,” Rushdoony argues that the church’s abandonment of God’s covenantal law in favor of humanistic law has fueled the suicide of Western civilization by enthroning man’s autonomy—self-law—in place of God’s theonomy. He insists that law and grace are inseparable because every covenant requires law: God’s covenant with man is an act of sovereign grace in which divine law defines the life of grace, not its negation. By rejecting Biblical law, modern theology freed the state from accountability to God while demanding greater submission to civil authority, allowing positivist law to declare the state the sole source of justice. Rushdoony critiques figures like Kuyper for grounding civil authority in “common grace” while permitting autonomous lawmaking, a move that ultimately empowered revolutionary statism. Liberalism, pragmatism, and materialism then erased absolute values, replacing God with the state as lawgiver and paving the way for modern despotisms. True freedom, he concludes, cannot be found in free will, democracy, or pietism, but only in covenantal obedience to Christ, where grace and law stand together and “the Son” alone makes men free.

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