Anarchy in the Camp

Here are some more gems from Steve Camp:

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Where ECB comes in (a term I coined) is that they are trying to fight spiritual battles with carnal weaponry (2 Cor. 10:1-4). Abortion, Gay marriage, etc. are not political problems, but are issues of the heart and are spiritual ones. They need the gospel; not legislation.

We don't have the right biblically to go around holding unsaved people to that same standard (1 Cor. 5; Rom. 6:20) as they do in many of their writings and radio broadcasts (Being constantly critical of non-believers for living like non-believers.)
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So Steve Camp is an anarchist—at least where unbelievers are concerned. According to St. Paul, the law is not for the lawful, but for the lawless (1 Tim 1:9).

Paul is no antinomian. He isn’t saying that Christians are above the law. His point, rather, is that the Christian is already law-abiding. He has internalized the law. He is a law-keeper, not a law-breaker.

But in Camp’s upside down world, the law is not for unbelievers, but believers--not for the unjust, but for the just, not for rebels, but for the righteous.

Notice, in vv10-11, how Paul goes on to specify the very sorts of unsaved sinners whom Camp has exempted.

Indeed, as Liefeld points out in his commentary, vv9-10 are modeled upon the Decalogue (Deut 5:6-12). Cf. 1 & 2 Timothy, Titus (Zondervan 1999), 64.

So the law that unbeliever are still under is the Mosaic criminal code—or at least the Decalogue. And it’s hard to separate the case law for the Mosaic code which the case law exemplifies.

So Steve Camp has decided to go into business for himself, with his homemade theology and moral anarchy.

It’s true that abortion and sodomy are spiritual problems. They issue from a sinful heart. Of course, the very same thing could be said of rape and robbery, as well as other forms of murder and immorality.

Does it follow that homicide and pedophilia, to take but two examples, are not political problems, but only spiritual problems? Is the solution, not laws banning murder and child-rape, but mass evangelism?

In the first place, laws don’t exist for the benefit of the perpetrator, but for the potential victim--as, among other things, a deterrent to crime. Laws were never intended to help the perpetrator.

There is, in addition, the principle of retributive justice. But Camp abandons both deterrence and retribution for a purely remedial rationale. That, however, is unscriptural.

Is there a double standard--one for believers and another for unbelievers? Is there no common code of conduct?

Camp is confusing social ethics with sodality or consociation. You can’t have a society without social mores. You can’t have a polis without a political system.

But people relate to each other on more than one level. There are various subcultures within the general culture.

I, as an American citizen, am subject to Federal law. I’m also subject to state laws, which vary from state to state.

A student, a soldier, or a frat-boy, si as a member of a voluntary association, subject to its particular terms of membership. If you break the rules, you can be expelled. But to be expelled from school is not to lose your US citizenship.

The church is a voluntary association, with its own distinctive terms of membership. These are inapplicable to the unbeliever for the simple reason that the unbeliever is not a member of the church, and is disqualified from membership due to his unbelief. But if hardly follows from this fact that there is no standard of common decency.

We see this illustrated in the Mosaic Law. According to the Law, a resident alien was excluded from the Passover unless he underwent circumcision.

He was exempt from the ceremonial law. But he was not exempt from the civil law. The criminal code applied to Jew and resident alien alike.

From this distance we cannot always draw a bright red line. There were unspoken rules to which we are not privy. There was a cultural preunderstanding and common knowledge that we can’t recover.

When in doubt, we have to draw our own lines, based on broad Biblical norms. But the radical individualism and laissez-faire antinomianism of Camp is wholly opposed to Biblical ethics.