The Open Face of Religion

This position paper argues that all religions are fundamentally systems of law, revealing who or what a society recognizes as sovereign. Historically, what we now call “religion” was understood as law Christian law, Islamic law, or otherwise because law expresses a people’s ultimate authority. The Enlightenment and modern humanism sought to obscure this reality by redefining law as a human invention, but Scripture teaches that the original sin was man’s attempt to seize lawmaking authority from God and determine good and evil for himself. When God is sovereign, His Word is law; when the state or man is sovereign, law becomes humanistic, leading inevitably to moral anarchy and social decay. Modern education, positivism, socialism, and even much of the contemporary church have rejected God’s law in favor of man’s, resulting in a society that is increasingly lawless and self-destructive. True restoration, the paper concludes, requires the church to recover confidence in the whole law of God, recognizing that law is the open face of religion and that a society’s laws unmistakably reveal its god.

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