10 Truths - 2 - Christianity - Best - Conclusion

Ten Truths – 2- Christianity – Best –Conclusion
cinops be gone Friday, Aug. 22, 2008
Rule of Law:
The Roman Caesars, unfettered by legal or moral restrictions, had been prone to mercilessly dispatching their victims to death. Historian Alvin Schmidt reports that Tiberius enjoyed seeing his torture victims thrown into the sea, and a suspicious Caligula had his entire palace staff killed.
Christianity, however, brought a new ethic and new idea about the limits of civil authority. Ambrose the fourth century bishop of Milan, rebuked Emperor Theodosius I, telling him that “No one not even the emperor is above the law.” That challenge to the sovereignty of the Caesars, who required worship from their subjects and often threw them to the lions for refusing to do so, was a new thought for the ancient world. 24

It was a Christian idea that the king, like his subjects, was subject to the law. As Christianity took root, so did this revolutionary idea, and slowly it worked its way into Western law. As the first British monarch to rule over all of England, King Alfred the Great (849-899) place English law on an explicitly biblical foundation, drawing from “the Ten Commandments, the Laws of Moses, the Golden rule of Christ, and biblical principles.” According to one commentator, King Alfred’s published laws “were a creative effort of government unique in Europe and marked the beginning of a great age for England.”

As the Bible was applied to civic law, “the Christian church effected nothing short of a revolution in the forms of Western politics.” King Alfred also saw the connection between an educated populace and effective government and he promoted general education and insisted that his nobles read and learn Christian history. His view of government, he wrote was that”

‘Local government ought to be synonymous with local Christian virtue, otherwise it become local tyranny, local corruption and local iniquity.’

The idea that even the king was subject to the rule of law was tested 300 years later by the tyrannical rule of King John. But in 1215, the English barons, with the help of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, and other ecclesiastical leaders, forced the king to submit himself to a written charter, the Magna Carta placed specific limitations on the king’s rule and, according to an American Bar Foundation publication, it provided “the foundation on which has come to rest the entire structure of Anglo-American constitutional liberties.” This landmark document, which clearly rested on the Holy Scripture, later served as the cornerstone for the American colonists’ claim that King George III had violated their rights as British subjects. 24-27

“The Bible,” as Dr. D. James Kennedy has written, “laid the foundations and principles upon which the Magna Carta was framed.” But can the Bible serve as a political handbook? The next chapter on Friday, Aug. 28th answers that question.
George H. Kubeck, Duplicate, and translate into Spanish and Vietnamese.