A strange movement has developed of late whereby leading pastors of
the reformed faith teach a doctrine that amounts to the divine right of
kings. Advocating an oversimplified obedience to passages such as
Romans 13, some of these teachers such as Dr. John McArthur go so far as
to posit that the American Revolution was an act of un-biblical
rebellion and that the American nation was founded in sin.This teaching is seductive because it relieves both pastor and pew from involvement in public affairs and the troubling decisions that arise in the imperfect and often stormy relationship between the truly practicing Christian and government. This doctrine sits well with oh so holy but culturally disengaged church leaders since it offers theological justification for withdrawal from the culture war being fought around them. This compromise also sits well with the anti-Christian culture and offers them a great advantage. The confessing church can believe what it will so long as they do nothing about it and keep their beliefs to themselves in their ever shrinking congregations but out of the public square.
The net result of this teaching to the casual hearer is a form of sanctified isolation and pacifism that is repugnant to both the scriptures and history. The early reformers would be appalled if they heard such a teaching in their name. John Calvin addressed the complexities of the Romans 13 dilemma well and in so doing set forth the founding principles of a legal theory known as the doctrine of the lesser magistrates:
"Although the Lord takes vengeance on unbridled domination, let us not therefore suppose that that vengeance is committed to us, to whom no command has been given but 2675 to obey and suffer. I speak only of private men. For when popular magistrates have been appointed to curb the tyranny of kings (as the Ephori, who were opposed to kings among the Spartans, or Tribunes of the people to consuls among the Romans, or Demarchs to the senate among the Athenians; and perhaps there is something similar to this in the power exercised in each kingdom by the three orders, when they hold their primary diets). So far am I from forbidding these officially to check the undue license of kings, that if they connive at kings when they tyrannise and insult over the humbler of the people, I affirm that their dissimulation is not free from nefarious perfidy, because they fraudulently betray the liberty of the people, while knowing that, by the ordinance of God, they are its appointed guardians.” John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Chapter 20, Para. 31.
Calvin went further in another passage "For earthly princes lay aside their power when they rise up against God, and are unworthy to be reckoned among the number of mankind. We ought, rather, to spit upon their heads than to obey them." John Calvin Commentary on Daniel, Lecture XXX Daniel 6:22)
John Knox was a contemporary of Calvin and the founder of what we now know as the Presbyterian Church. His dialogue with Queen Mary on this issue is most instructive:
Queen Mary: "Think ye that subjects, having the power, may resist their princes?" John Knox: "If their princes exceed their bounds, Madam, no doubt they may be resisted, even by power. For there is neither greater honor, nor greater obedience, to be given to kings or princes, than God hath commanded to be given unto father and mother. But the father may be stricken with a frenzy, in which he would slay his children. If the children arise, join themselves together, apprehend the father, take the sword from him, bind his hands, and keep him in prison till his frenzy be overpast: think ye, Madam, that the children do any wrong? It is even so, Madam, with princes that would murder the children of God that are subjects unto them. Their blind zeal is nothing but a very mad frenzy, and therefore, to take the sword from them, to bind their hands, and to cast them into prison, till they be brought to a more sober mind, is no disobedience against princes, but just obedience, because it agreeth with the will of God." At these words, the Queen stood as it were amazed, more than the quarter of an hour. Her countenance altered, so that Lord James began to entreat her and to demand, "What hath offended you, Madam?" At length she said: "Well then, I perceive that my subjects shall obey you, and not me. They shall do what they list, and not what I command; and so must I be subject to them, and not they to me." John Knox: "God forbid that ever I take upon me to command any to obey me, or yet to set subjects at liberty to do what pleaseth them! My travail is that both princes and subjects obey God. Think not, Madam, that wrong is done you, when ye are willed to be subject to God. It is He that subjects peoples under princes, and causes obedience to be given unto them. Yea, God craves of Kings that they be foster-fathers to His Church, and commands Queens to be nurses to His people. This subjection, Madam, unto God, and unto His troubled Church, is the greatest dignity that flesh can get upon the face of the earth; for it shall carry them to everlasting glory." John Knox being interrogated by Mary Queen of Scots http://www.reformation.org/john-knox-interview.html
Previously, in his famous Appellation to the Nobility and Estates of Scotland (1558) Knox had stated:
“For now the common song of all men is, ‘We must obey our kings, be they good or be they bad; for God has so commanded.....True it is, God has commanded kings to be obeyed; but likewise true it is, that in things which they commit against His glory, He has commanded no obedience, but rather, He has approved, yea, and greatly rewarded, such as have opposed themselves to their ungodly commandments and blind rage."Samuel Rutherford, another father of the modern reformed movement, was a Scottish Presbyterian minister and professor at St. Andrews college. In his monumental work Lex Rex he states:
“I lay down this maxim of divinity: Tyranny being a work of Satan, is not from God, because sin, either habitual or actual, is not from God: the power that is, must be from God; the magistrate, as magistrate, is good in nature of office, and the intrinsic end of his office, (Rom. xiii. 4) for he is the minister of God for thy good; and, therefore, a power ethical, politic, or moral, to oppress, is not from God, and is not a power, but a licentious deviation of a power; and is no more from God, but from sinful nature and the old serpent, than a license to sin.” Samuel Rutherford, Lex Rex, Question IXRutherford's statement echoes previous teachings by Augustine,"It seems to me that an unjust law is no law at all ..." and Aquinas, "Human law is law only by virtue of its accordance with right reason; and thus it is manifest that it flows from the eternal law. And in so far as it deviates from right reason it is called an unjust law; in such case it is no law at all, but rather a species of violence." Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Ia-Ilae, q. xciii, art. 3, ad 2m
Great Britain's most famous jurist, Sir William Blackstone, was often called the legal father of the American Revolution. Drawing from classical sources including Cicero and ecclesiastical sources such as Augustine and Aquinas, Blackstone codified the natural law of philosophy and made it literally the law of the land on both sides of the Atlantic for almost 200 years. According to Blackstone:
"This law of nature, being coeval with mankind and dictated by God Himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe in all countries, and at all times: no human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid derive all their force, and all their authority, mediately or immediately, from this original ... The doctrines thus delivered we call the revealed or divine law, and they are to be found only in the Holy Scriptures. ... Upon these two foundations, the law of nature and the law of revelation, depend all human laws; that is to say, no human laws should be suffered to contradict these. ... And herein it is that human laws have their greatest force and efficacy: for, with regard to such points as are not indifferent, human laws are only declaratory of, and act in subordination to the former. To instance in the case of murder: this is expressly forbidden by the divine, and demonstrably by the natural law; and from these prohibitions arises the true unlawfulness of this crime. Those human laws that annex a punishment to it do not at all increase its moral guilt, or add any fresh obligation in foro conscientiae (in the court of conscience) to abstain from its perpetration. Nay, if any human law should allow or enjoin us to commit it, we, are bound to transgress that human law, or else we must offend both the natural and the divine. Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Part the Second, On the Nature of Laws.
Blackstone's work cast a long shadow across the Atlantic. It was literally revolutionary. Some members of parliament accused Blackstone of fomenting the American Revolution. At that time, there were more copies of his "Commentaries" in circulation in the colonies where they controlled their own printing presses than in the whole of Great Britain. Historian David Barton explained the effect this way:
"... most Christian denominations during the Founding Era held that while they were forbidden to overthrow the institution of government and live in anarchy, they were ‘not’ required blindly to submit to every law and policy. Those in the Founding Era understood that the general institution of government was unequivocally ordained by God and was not to be overthrown, but that did not mean that God approved every specific government; God had ordained government in lieu of anarchy – He opposed anarchy, rebellion, lawlessness, and wickedness and wanted civil government in society. Therefore, a crucial determination in the colonists’ Biblical exegesis was whether opposition to authority was simply to resist the general institution of government (an institution ordained by God Himself), or whether it was instead to resist tyrannical leaders who had themselves rebelled against God. (The Scriptural model for this position was repeatedly validated when God Himself raised up leaders such as Gideon, Ehud, Jepthah, Samson, and Deborah to throw off tyrannical governments – leaders subsequently praised in Hebrews 11:32 for those acts of faith.)"
In another treatise Barton explained:
“The Rev. Dr. John Witherspoon (also a signer of the Declaration) also affirmed: On the part of America, there was not the most distant thought of subverting the government or of hurting the interest of the people of Great Britain, but of defending their own privileges from unjust encroachment; there was not the least desire of withdrawing their allegiance from the common sovereign [King George III] till it became absolutely necessary – and indeed, it was his own choice. 27
"Significantly, as Dr. Witherspoon had correctly noted, it was Great Britain who had terminated the entreaties; in fact, during the last two years of America’s appeals, her peaceful pleas were directly met by armed military force. King George III dispatched 25,000 British troops to invade his own Colonies, enter the homes of his own citizens to take their private possessions and goods, and imprison them without trials – all in violation of his own British Common Law, English Bill of Rights, and Magna Carta (centuries old documents that formed the basis of the covenant between British rulers and citizens). Only when those governmental covenants had been broken by their rulers and America had been directly attacked did the Americans respond in self-defense.
"On the basis of these two theological understandings (that God Himself had ordained the institution of civil government, and that God had explicitly authorized civil self-defense) the Founding Fathers and the majority of American Christians in that day believed that they were conducting themselves in a manner that was not in rebellion to God or the Scriptures." http://www.wallbuilders.com/libissuesarticles.asp?id=24548
Blackstone's radical theories of natural law based upon the word of God also had a profound effect in Great Britain:
"The fervor of abolitionism came from the New Testament, a body of literature providing the universal principles of natural law to attack slavery. Faith crossed borders and oceans, with Christians in both Britain and America invoking natural law first to end the slave trade (1807) and then to abolish it entirely within the British Empire (1833).
"The story really begins in Britain, where an unlikely Member of Parliament, William Wilberforce, courageously took up the cause of human emancipation, despite virtually universal opposition ..... he had a conversion experience leading him to devote his life to freeing those in bondage. In 1791, his bill to abolish the slave trade failed by a wide margin but he persisted. In 1807, Wilberforce released A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade on the eve of Parliament’s overwhelming vote to end the trade in human beings—a remarkable change in fifteen years. In 1823, “God’s politician” began a ten-year campaign to end slavery entirely, releasing his Appeal to the Religion, Justice and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British Empire in Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies, in which he claimed that total and unqualified emancipation was a moral and ethical “duty before God.” Wilberforce died in 1833 just as Parliament abolished slavery. His friend John Newton, once one of the cruelest of slave traders, later in life went through a similar “born again” experience and wrote the famous song “Amazing Grace”—hence the title of the movie about Wilberforce’s awe-inspiring campaign against slavery."
“After years spent openly opposing Adolf Hitler and encouraging Germans to turn against his regime, Dietrich Bonhoeffer — a Christian minister, theologian, pacifist and German citizen — made a deliberate turn from civil disobedience to secret participation in a cabal whose aim was to assassinate the Fuhrer. Bonhoeffer laid aside his Christian pacifism when he woke up to the fact that Hitler was engaging in genocide. This outraged Bonhoeffer, who held the deep religious conviction that the Jews were a people precious to God and deserving of protection, whatever the personal cost. As a pacifist, Bonhoeffer had quietly refused to join the military. With his newfound commitment to Hitler's murder he changed direction and joined the German Abwehr, the wartime intelligence agency headed by Admiral Wilheim Canaris. Canaris was secretly opposed to Hitler and was using Abwehr to launch a variety of plots against the Reich, including assassination attempts. Bonhoeffer never participated directly in such plots — they had to be carried out by the military, because officers were the only ones who could get close enough to the Fuhrer to kill him. Nevertheless, Bonhoeffer aided and encouraged these plots from his post inside the Abwehr. Pretending to be a loyal servant of Hitler's Reich, Bonhoeffer was in fact a double agent working towards Hitler's forcible overthrow. http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2009/06/tiller-long-bonhoeffer
This historical theme presented itself again in the 1950's in the United States during the black Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Martin Luther King stated:
“You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all." Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Letter From A Birmingham Jail
Later in the same letter, Dr. King observed:
"We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. But I am sure that if I had lived in Germany during that time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal. If I lived in a Communist country today where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I believe I would openly advocate disobeyingSimilar statements are now being heard from Christian leaders such as Mat Staver, Chief Counsel of Liberty Counsel and former Dean of Liberty University Law School:
these anti-religious laws." Ibid
“….this decision or opinion of five lawyers is not the rule of law, we have established or spoken about that, it is an illegitimate opinion just as many of the opinions of the Supreme Court have been absolutely illegitimate, wrong. They’ve been harmful and we have subsequently recognized them as such. There is a concept that we have discussed in our marriage pledge about higher law and earthly law. This is a direct conflict with the higher law, so this is an opinion of five lawyers that’s illegitimate. They can have their opinion, we shouldn’t accept it as a legitimate rule of law — it’s not.”Even institutions that many Evangelicals consider only nominally Christian institutions such as Catholic Hospitals are now under the gun:
“A systematic, more and more obvious persecution of Christians has been going on for some time. Its briefest statement is that no one can be a citizen of this country and a practicing Christian at the same time. Persecution is now so obvious that it needs little emphasis. Yet, most of our citizens refuse to acknowledge it or do anything about those elected and unelected officials, from the president on down, who carry it out in increasingly ominous ways. This country itself was designed to prevent precisely this sort of public persecution. We suddenly realize that the constitutional mechanism to prevent this persecution is not working but is being used to foster, indeed justify, the persecution.” Rev. James v. Schall, SJ http://www.crisismagazine.com/2015/will-catholic-hospitals-be-the-next-targetJust as in the first American Revolution, the time has come for a biblical response to an American system of civil government that has proven itself to be illegitimate in the eyes of God. Such a response is grounded in both solid theology and history. American Christians are now faced with fewer and fewer choices in addressing a civil government bent upon, at minimum, driving them from the public square if not destroying them outright as a cultural influence. They can do nothing and by so doing side with the powers of darkness. Martin Luther spoke to this:
"If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at the moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved to be steady… [It] is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point [of attack]." Quoted by Francis A. Schaeffer in The Great Evangelical Disaster, Crossway, 1984, p. 50-51
Or, they can join their forefathers on the path of the confessing Christian citizen. Direct legal, political and military action by which the authority of a sitting sovereign is declared illegitimate should be the last resort to be engaged in defensively only after all other avenues of recourse and means of appeal have either been exhausted or conclusively proven futile ... and legitimate lesser magistrates are in agreement. Again, this should be the last resort but it should not be condemned as unscriptural. This was the model of the first American Revolution.
The path of the Christian citizen does not promise that its followers will enjoy the temporary advantages that come from obsequious servitude to an illegitimate sovereign. As a matter of fact, it almost certainly assures that you will lose position, privilege, property, friends and even family. But, it also promises a clear conscience before God and an eternal legacy on the right side of history.
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A Postscript:
A few Sundays ago, I attended a church where the pastor made a statement that made me want to stand up and cheer. I have said it myself thousands of time. But, this pastor, a stranger to me, repeated my thoughts almost verbatim. He looked up from his Bible in the middle of his sermon, looked out across the congregation and said solemnly, "If you are able to live in this culture in the state it is in right now and you are not suffering persecution, then you need to examine your position in Christ."
The good pastor's brutally honest statement assumes two facts not really in evidence in modern Christianity. The first is that the pulpits of America are plainly and simply identifying the confessing Church's duty to oppose evil in society. This is too often simply not the case. Too many otherwise doctrinally sound churches operate in almost complete isolation from the culture around them. It is possible to attend extremely orthodox churches for years and never once hear the pulpit say plainly and simply, "abortion is murder and it is your duty as a Christian to never do anything to even accommodate it much less participate in it," or "homosexuality is an abomination before God and man and it is your duty to never, ever treat it as normal much less accommodate it."
The second fact not in evidence is the notion that Christians actually practice what is taught in the pulpit. After a couple of decades of practicing law in the Christian community, I can tell you firsthand that serious Christianity is very much a Sunday "suit of clothes" for a lot of people occupying the pews. If taken seriously, in this culture, the teaching mentioned in the last paragraph would cause many successful Christian professionals such as doctors and lawyers to lose their privileges and many more Christians in the workforce to lose their jobs. But, this of course begs the original question, if you as a Christian are still functioning successfully in this evil environment how have you avoided the consequences of standing for your faith? Perhaps, that is the ultimate question.
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