Liberating Planet Earth

Th Liberation of the State 107
cultural activity by his overriding sense of guilt and his masochistic
activity. He will progressively demand of the state a redemptive
role. What he cannot do personally, i.e., to save himself, he demands
that the state do for him, so that the state, as man enlarged,
becomes the human savior of man. The politics of guilt, therefore,
is not directed, as the Christian politics of liberty, to the creation of
godly justice and order, but to the creation of a redeeming order, a
saving state (p. 9).
Christian jurisprudence cannot adopt a doctrine of the saving
state and remain orthodox. The adoption of just such a concept of
the state in the twentieth century testifies to the extent to which
the modern world has abandoned Christian orthodoxy.
Jamming the System
One of the most important aspects of any legal order is the
willingness of the citizens of a society to exercise self-restraint.
This means that men must emphasize se~-gozmnment, as well as
gain access to court systems that serve as alternatives to civil government.
This was a basic feature of the Western legal tradition
after the mid-twelfth century, although since World War I, the rise
of socialistic administrative states has begun to undermine this
tradition, according to Professor Harold Berman of Harvard in
his important book, Law and Resolution (Harvard University
Press, 1983). He says that this development now threatens the
survival of freedom in the West.
Self-government is not a zero-price resource. The emphasis in
the Bible on training up children in the details of Biblical law
must be understood as a requirement of citizens to provide “social
overhead capital” for civilization: respect for law and therefore
self-restraint. Another aspect of the public’s respect for civil law is
the se~-restraint of government oficials in not burdening the society
with a massive, incomprehensible structure of administrative law.
When civil law reaches into every aspect of the daily lives of
men, the state loses a very important subsidy from the public,
namely, men’s willingness to submit voluntarily to the civil law.
Any legal structure is vulnerable to the foot-dragging of the pub-