The authors challenge the Westminster's faculty's assertion that biblical civil law is no longer binding in the New Covenant era, especially its mandated negative civil sanctions against convicted criminals. The theologians and public representatives of traditional Christianity have yet to answer this question forthrightly. It is as if the question were illegitimate, and embarrassing breach of etiquette. No one had asked it since the late seventeenth century, and it is considered to be in very poor taste to ask it today. Yet the question of law is increasingly relevant today, for we live in a world of collapsing moral values.
Civil law is a manifestation of society's moral order.
It is the voice of society's god. Whenever a society loses faith in its legal order, it is on the verge of a revolution. After 1988, Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union could no longer delay this revolution. This had been preceded by a generation of growing doubt regarding the moral legitimacy of Marxism-Leninism. In 1991, European societies that have been built in terms of left-wing Englightment thought collapsed.