Abelard

In “Abelard,” Rushdoony argues that Peter Abelard’s revival of pagan philosophy reintroduced a fatal division between law and love, deed and intent, dissolving the Biblical unity of justice, grace, faith, and works under God’s sovereign decree. By claiming that those who crucified Christ did not sin because they believed they were acting rightly, Abelard shifted moral authority from God’s law to the subjective heart of man, redefining sin as faulty intent rather than lawbreaking. This move assumed man’s natural goodness and reduced evil to ignorance, laying the groundwork for antinomianism, moral relativism, and ultimately statist tyranny. When law is no longer God’s revealed righteousness but man’s creation, sovereignty transfers either to autonomous individuals or to the state as god walking on earth. The erosion of Biblical law thus produces not freedom but conflict, bureaucracy, and oppression, as humanism’s rejection of divine law inevitably culminates in totalitarian rule.

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