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Who is Jesus Christ?
| I | He is God the Father's only-begotten Son, man's Savior. THIS FATEFUL ANSWER DICTATES THE PUBLIC POLICIES BELOW. | C O N F L I C T I N G L O G I C A L C O R O L L A R I E S & I M P L I C A T I O N S |
He was a good man, great teacher, but no divine Savior. THIS FATEFUL ANSWER DICTATES THE PUBLIC POLICIES BELOW. | |
| TRINITARIANISM: one God, Whose Three Persons share sovereignty; Unity and plurality are equally ultimate. |
UNITARIANISM: one Person, one God, no shared sovereignty; Unity is superior to plurality. |
II | ||
| III | PESSIMISM ON HUMAN NATURE: Christ's deity implies man's depravity. Only a divine Savior can regenerate man, who cannot self-regenerate. Conversely, man's depravity implies Christ's deity. Man cannot self-redeem, so Christ must be divine to overcome evil. | OPTIMISM ON HUMAN NATURE: Christ's non-deity implies man's innate goodness. Gradual natural human progress is possible. Conversely, man's innate goodness implies Christ's non-deity. If man man is born virtuous or can self-evolve into bliss, he needs no divine Savior to overcome evil. | ||
| Through federalism, separation of powers, and checks and balances, Trinitarian U.S. Constitutionalism replicates divine SHARED SOVEREIGNTY in human government to, in Jefferson's words, "bind [rulers] down from mischief." | Unitarianism replicates its divine UNITARY SOVEREIGNTY in centralized human government, confident that benign, incorruptible rulers will not misuse unrestrained power, reflecting its optimism on human nature. | IV | ||
| V | Human rights restrain selfish rulers, who threaten them (e.g., regular legislative sessions, free legislative debate, right to bear arms, habeas corpus, presumed innocence, trial by jury of peers, no excessive bail or fines, no cruel or unusual punishments, right to petition, free elections, no taxation without consent, due process of law before property seizure, liability for unlawful seizure, no martial law in peacetime, no standing army in peacetime without consent, free peacetime travel, no troops quartered in private homes in peacetime without owners' consent). | Human rights empower benevolent rulers to promote "social/economic justice" (e.g., price controls, including minimum wages and Federal Reserve-fixed interest rates; wealth redistribution through progressive and estate/ inheritance taxes, alternative minimum taxation, and earned income tax credits; entitlements; affirmative action; subsidies to unproductive consumption and taxes on productive consumption; and monetary inflation to fund welfare-state deficits, a de facto tax which shifts net purchasing power from the private to the public sector). | ||
| If a state can secede, it is sovereign. If it cannot, the federal government is sovereign. The Constitution's silence on the right to secede bears compelling witness to its fundamentally Trinitarian sharing of sovereignty. | Unitarian sovereignty is indivisible, an either-or matter, all or nothing. "Shared sovereignty" is oxymoronic here. State and federal governments' sharing of sovereignty is supposedly no more possible than being half-pregnant. | VI | ||
| VII | CONSTITUTIONAL, NOT FEDERAL, SUPREMACY: Constitutional laws are supreme. Unconstitutional federal laws are null and void. The people, not the federal government, finally decide constitutionality. If the federal government has last say on its constitutional powers, Jefferson wrote, the federal government and not the Constitution is then supreme. States too must judge federal powers under the Constitution, he said, to help protect the people. | FEDERAL, NOT CONSTITUTIONAL, SUPREMACY: Unitarians misread the "supremacy clause" in Article VI of the Constitution to say that federal law automatically trumps conflicting state law, thus dispensing with the need for judicial review. Unitarianism also confuses lawful states' rights under the Constitution with unlawful state sovereignty over the Constitution, as if Appomattox therefore effectively repealed the 10th Amendment. | ||
| Proper judicial review under limited constitutional government: The rule of law requires uniformity and predictability. That demands respect for original intent and strict construction in constitutional interpretation. Madison insisted that the purpose of enumerating federal powers was to exclude unenumerated powers. "Necessary and proper" means "absolutely necessary." | Improper judicial supremacy over limited constitutional government: The Supreme Court sits as a continuing constitutional convention, erasing the commerce clause's originally intended distinction between intrastate and interstate commerce and infringing on states' originally reserved police powers. "Necessary and proper" means "convenient, and not forbidden" (loose construction). | VIII | ||
| IX | Consistent with its Trinitarian denial of human sovereignty over the money supply, the 1787 Constitution accepted the existing Biblical system of parallel standards, where gold and silver both circulated at no legally-set exchange ratio, assuring a reasonably stable hard-money supply. | Claiming human sovereignty over the money supply, the U.S. from 1792-1873 legally fixed the dollar's gold-silver exchange ratio. This bimetallism often lagged the changing market ratio, drove the undervalued metal out of circulation, and destabilized the money supply. | ||
| In accord with its pessimism on human nature, the U.S. Constitutional Convention's original intent was to deny human sovereignty over the money supply by refusing to authorize federal charters of corporations, specifically of (presumably fractional-reserve) banks. | Pursuant to its optimism on human nature, Unitarianism favors federal charters of fractional-reserve banks, whose expansion of the money supply cuts purchasing power, shifts net wealth from citizens to banks, and causes or worsens booms and busts ("business cycles"). | X | ||
| XI | Also true to its pessimism on human nature, the U.S. Constitutional Convention's original intent was to deny abusive human sovereignty over the money supply, by voting down a proposal to authorize federal emissions of "bills of credit," i.e., unbacked federal fiat paper money. | Unitarian welfare statism requires human sovereignty over the money supply and infinite inflation to fund its unslakeable deficits. Allegedly doles will not cause self-destructive, anti-social behavior by virtuous recipients, nor high taxes lower production by altruistic workers. | ||
| Trinitarian U.S. Constitutionalism echoes the Biblical rule (Deut. 17:17) that government must not "greatly multiply" the money supply. This harmonizes with the relatively inelastic gold standard and fits with the Biblical principle (Ex. 20:15) that "Thou shalt not steal," which inflation does to both creditors' and debtors' purchasing power. | Unitarian welfare statism drives American interventionist foreign policy and overseas U.S. military involvements ("imperial overstretch"). Ever-expanding deficits and relentless inflation ever more quagmire the armed forces worldwide to sustain demand for fiat dollars as the sole reserve currency to settle international trade balances. | XII |