Rousas Rushdoony: Law and Liberty: Lands without Justice

We now come back from a short hiatus on Rushdoony and pick up again on the topic of justice.  Rushdoony's first point is that, "a society not grounded on the triune God and His law is a society destined to reveal its basic hostility to justice."  I think we can agree that society has increasingly looked to separate itself from both God and His law with the repercussion of increasing injustice across the board, all the while exclaiming that the nation is moving towards a more just land.  The problem is that on one hand, biblical morality is quantifiable, such that it can be appealed to and a judgment made whether justice is truly being upheld.  On the other hand, as we slide towards humanist secularism, it is all too easy just to merely declare that the nation is becoming more just, when in fact there is no standard to meet other than the prevailing whims of those in power. 
Rushdoony states later in the chapter that, "without justice, the law becomes of form of theft.  Stripped of justice, the law becomes an instrument of extortion and oppression in the hands of whatever group of men control it."  Is this not the culture we see today operating across every sphere of life?  On the individual level all the way to the civil government, a improper understanding of law, detached from its grounding in God's word and combined with a disregard for personal and corporate responsibility has led to a culture of injustice across the board.  Contrast biblical law with this next quote. "Because humanism has no ultimate right or wrong, its law is democratic law, that is, it simply expresses the will of the people.  But the will of man, whether as an individual or in mass, is, according to Scripture, a sinful will.  Sinful man is not interested in justice; he is interested in himself."
We are already well into this process both of eliminating the influence of God and His law from our nation as well as the subtle shift from republican views of rule towards the more democratic.  Both are devastating and ultimately linked to one another.  In the republic, there is a high view of law as that which constrains the majority by the standards of law, the best case being constraint by God's law which does, in actuality, provide maximum freedom.  On the other hand, a democratic view of rule, leaves the majority unfettered in its ability to inflict injustice on others as it lies relatively unconstrained by the law given the momentum to detach law from ultimate truth and place it in the fickle hands of man's shifting mores.  As this shift happens, we see its natural outgrowth in a civil government that feels increasingly willing to openly violate and disregard the laws of the nation.  As this continues, the only outcome will ultimately be totalitarianism in one form of another.