Rules for Reformers

by Douglas Wilson

Secular conservatism will sometimes buy you some time, but that is about all it can do—that and lure you into the complacent notion that it can do more than that. Secular conservatism is like trying to use your pocket handkerchief to slow you down after the main chute has failed. This is why individual heart transformation, not legislation, is fundamental to national reformation. The person and work of Jesus is not optional.

Alinsky knew that culture precedes politics. Revolution “must be preceded by reformation.

In an egalitarian culture, however, true leadership is despised and precedence is frequently given to technicians, bureaucrats, and various kinds of intellectual ground-pounders. This means things can get fearfully skewed—we have generals who do not see the principles involved, and sergeants who do. The distinction between principles and “methods” is an objective one. However, to the one who is not gifted enough to see the distinction, the whole thing will appear to be a Zen exercise.

One of the first things a reformer has got to get used to is the experience of being despised and unpopular. Societies do awful things (that which needs to be reformed) because they want to, and the reformer is the one beckoning them to a state of affairs that they don’t much want.

The man of integrity decides according to the law, and not according to whether the plaintiff has had a hard life.

There are two kinds of non-conformity, and only one of them wears hipster glasses. The kind that does wear them is a very popular form of pretending to be out of the mainstream, in order to be the envy of it, and the other is a radical form of unpopularity, calculated

to get you slandered and viciously attacked,

on the way to changing the direction of the mainstream. One kind of non-conformity requires courage, while the other kind requires nothing more than vanity ...

A decisive point is a place that is significant enough to matter to the enemy if you successfully take it, and insignificant enough to actually take. This means that the selected target is both strategic and feasible.

To identify and go after a decisive point is the way to have a disproportionate impact.

The system, the Establishment, or the Man, as we used to call it, is a ramshackle, run-down dive of a house, greatly in need of some repairs—let us call it our crack-house culture. All of us live in it, there being no choice in the matter—to live at all is to live here. At the same time, the inhabitants of said house divide into three main groups, distinguished by the different approaches they take to what we should do about this sad reality. Three different groups have three differing objectives.

Objective Takeaway Point: The objective needs to be clear, and rightly nested within other, larger objectives. When the bugle blows indistinctly, no one gets ready for battle.

Remember the classic Reformed stance on civil resistance, which certainly limits how this principle may be employed when considering the lawfulness of armed resistance. Evil authorities are first to have the word preached to them, and every lawful means of appeal and resistance should be applied.

Offensive Takeaway Point: We should look for a way to stop responding to initiatives of the adversary and start behaving in such a way that they have to figure out how to respond to us. Take the initiative.

If you gather numerous Christians in one place, and you don’t do anything, then what you are doing is creating a ghetto. We can gather in Wheaton, or Colorado Springs, or Grand Rapids, (or Moscow), but this is not sufficient. The principle of concentration is not the same thing as gregariousness, or proving the adage about birds of feather.

Concentration Takeaway Point: Concentration is not to be pursued for the sake of a respite; it is a concentration of force, applied in ways the adversary wants you to stop. So don’t stop.

In his first pass, he allowed any soldier who was afraid to fight to simply go home (Judg. 7:1–3). He lost two thirds of his army that way. God looked at the remaining 10,000 and thought that the Israelites might still take the credit for themselves if they won, and so He had Gideon test his soldiers by watching them drink.

So communication is a key principle of war. When the principle of communication is being considered it is very important for us to begin with the headship of Jesus Christ over His body, the Church. The right hand does not communicate with the left hand, but rather with the head. When this happens, the right and left hand cooperate. When it does not, the body functions (to whatever extent it does function) in a spastic fashion. We are told that if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another (1 John 1:7). Communication with the Head will result in natural communication with one another. It will also (incidentally) contribute to our cooperation, another principle of war.

The key here is that we must be motivated by obedience, not by personal vendettas or malice. Someone who hates may fight enthusiastically, but necessarily without wisdom. We do not strike because it is “fun” or simply because it would make the adversary mad. If making the enemy mad or irrational is part of the strategy, fine, but if it is because we are being irrational, that is not fine.

In our culture wars, the unbelieving world is enormous. We must not assume we must attack all along the front with everything we have. This would neglect concentration, as well as deplete our resources, violating economy of force. In other words, pick your battles carefully and then use the force it takes at that point of battle. The point is not to fight, the point is to fight and win that particular field. What will it take to do that?

Failure to pursue frequently reveals that the objective in the campaign was not victory, but rather some version of the “upper hand.” Once we have fought to the point where we might be left alone for a while, we stop. This often happens because Christians are peace-loving people, and this sometimes gets them into trouble. Too often we drag a problem out and make the whole thing last ten times longer than it has to last. But when the principle of pursuit is employed, it is clear that victory is the objective.

Pursuit is the principle neglected by the currently strong. Many wars have been prolonged because the victorious army did not press its advantage in the immediate aftermath of a critical battle. This is what happened in the Union victory at Gettysburg—failure to pursue lengthened the war by a couple of years.

Your only absolute loyalty is to God and His Word, but because of this, He has required that you love your wife, love your neighbor, and love your enemy. Everybody you meet will be at least one of those. Not only so, but God has defined for us in His Word what love and loyalty look like in each one of those instances. Your love for God, your loyalty to Him, must be constant. Because it is the one constant, your love and loyalty to your family and companions, and to adversaries, can look very different at different times. But it must be the same constant thing, looking different, not different things, falling apart.

There is no excuse for Christians giving their children over to the enemy for their education. There is no sense in giving them over for education in “the neutral parts,” for there are no neutral parts. Christian children must have a Christian education.

It is not possible to understand the gospel of free grace intelligently if it does not lead to a love for free markets. Free grace creates free men, and free men trade in free markets. If you have a biblical worldview, you cannot be a libertarian. But if you have a biblical worldview, you will be accused of being one.

Do not assume that government regulators have the authority to tell you what the true meaning of Romans 13 is. We are to submit to the governing authorities, but not in everything, and not in the ways stipulated by them. Realize that civil disobedience can occur in areas other than worship or gospel preaching. Gideon was threshing in the wine vat because he was hiding from the tax man. The apostle Paul ran a road block at Damascus. David spent a good deal of time in the wilderness evading a man whom he acknowledged to be the Lord’s anointed.

What the world needs first is gospel, and your family is the best place to showcase the gospel to a lost and wandering culture. The gospel must be preached by anointed evangelists, but what we desperately need is a chorus of amens coming from families that live out this gospel.

Utilize social media, but not in a way that identifies you as a vapid waster-of-time on the one hand, or a certifiable crank on the other. If you are the kind of person who sends Instagrams of your breakfast, lunch, and dinner, along with updates on your periodic potty breaks, you are wasting a precious resource. But on the other hand, if you are in deadly earnest all the time and will tweet nothing not found in Leviticus, then we all hope that the concerned furrows on your brow don’t stick that way.

Do not spend your time worrying about how you are going to put out the fires that the adversary sets. Wake up in the morning thinking

about the fires you can set. Let them be the fire department.

As Alinsky stated in his thirteenth, we are to pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. But there is a caveat. This is a valuable principle, but we have to understand it in a Christian context. Because of the cross of Christ, it is possible to distinguish a sinner and his sin. This means that your adversary might wind up repenting, as Saul of Tarsus did, and if you have trouble with that possibility, you are being vindictive instead of being principled.

We do not insist on the whole thing now—we are incrementalists, and this is a long war—but we know what the point of our labor is. We must know the objective, and that objective, assigned in the Great Commission, is for every tribe and nation to confess the name of Jesus and bow down to Him. We do not believe we have to conquer Canaan in the next ten minutes, but we also don’t believe that we have the right to settle down and make peace treaties with Amorites.

(Josh. 8:2).

Sun Tzu was right—warfare is deception. A good general wants the enemy to believe the opposite of what is actually the case, in as many instances as possible. He wants him to believe he is far away when he is close, and to believe he is close when he is far away. He wants him to believe he is strong when he is weak, and weak when he is strong.

The ninth commandment strikes at the heart of falsehood and lies, which are the native language of the devil. Without truth and trust, biblical culture is an impossibility. “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” (Ex. 20:16).

Paul tells the Colossians not to lie to one another, because they had put off the old man with his deeds (3:9). Trust is essential to all community, and false witness makes trust impossible. False witness can exist in such a society, but if it is not punished severely, that society will not be a society long.

Bearing false witness is therefore civil war—warfare against one’s neighbor, one’s brother. It is an act of violence directed against someone with whom you should be at peace. Conversely, if it is lawful to deceive him directly and straight up, it is plainly time for a war that has moved beyond metaphor.

The same distinction exists with this sin as we see with the distinction between murder and just killing. We see godly deception as an act of honorable war, or in a time that was equivalent to war, throughout Scripture. God blessed the Hebrew midwives for lying to Pharaoh (Ex. 1:15–21); He justified Rahab through her deception concerning the Hebrew spies (Jas. 2:25); David feigned madness to get away from Achish the king of Gath (1 Sam. 21:13–15). Such examples can be multiplied in Scripture many times over. The key is covenant—unless a covenant is assaulted or betrayed, the duty of believers is to speak the truth in love (Eph, 4:15). False witness destroys amity. If the amity is already destroyed on other grounds, or if the amity needs to be destroyed, then deception is lawful.

“These six things the Lord hates, yes, seven are an abomination to Him: a proud look, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that are swift in running to evil, a false witness who speaks lies, and one who sows discord among brethren” (Prov. 6:16–19).

We should begin with the obvious—we have to deal with the sin of outright lies, which means we must repent and make restitution. Restitution means confessing the lie to the appropriate person, the person who was lied to. Whatever it costs to put the lie right, it will cost less than not putting it right. In doing this, we have to reject euphemisms—white lies, exaggerations, spin-doctoring, etc. This just means you are compounding the lies you have told to others with lies you are telling yourself. As Christians we have a duty to cultivate the habit of accuracy of mind—blurry edges, smudgy perspectives, telling just “your side,” even if you “honestly” think them to be true at the time you are speaking, are still violations of the ninth commandment.

Truth which is “technically” the truth is just clever lying. If you tell your wife that you are happy that the boss “came in sober today,” the fact that this is true doesn’t keep it from being a lie. Similarly, telling someone just half of the story is actually bad when the other half made all the difference. Many pietistic Christians comfort themselves that this is scrupulous truth-telling, when it really just reveals the subtlety

of their hearts. And if such a lie is told to the Gestapo (“Of course there are Jews in the basement,” followed by a sarcastic laugh), it may be justified on other grounds—just as lying through your teeth would be. (“I am hiding no Jews in the basement.”) And if such “technically true” lies are told to y...

The point of fighting is to win the peace. The Church Militant will not be bored in Heaven, sitting around with nothing to do. The Church Militant will have won through to Heaven, and will know what to do when it eventually gets there. In the words of the spiritual, “gonna lay down my sword and shield, down by the riverside.” In the words of Isaiah, we will study war no more—and this will be a blessing, not a grief.

Warfare describes the way the world is, and it is not a state of affairs chosen by us. Sheep don’t have to declare war on the wolves.

A godly satirist should be a member of a worshiping community of orthodox and faithful Christians, and he should live in such a way as to be accountable to others for his words and actions. He should not be the sole judge and arbiter of the words that come from his mouth and keyboard. He should be one who knows how to live fruitfully in community with other Christians (Eph. 5:21).

A godly satirist should be steeped in the language and categories of Scripture. This

should be done through constant reading and rereading, and/or listening repeatedly to Scripture on audio. Spurgeon said of Bunyan that if you pricked him anywhere, his blood would run bi...

3. A godly satirist should have a warm and affectionate relationship with his wife, sons, daughters, mother, and father. No close member of his family should flinch...

4. A godly satirist should be well-educated, well-read in the kind of literature that he is seeking to contribute to. A good ear comes not only from practice, but also from listening long and thoughtfully to those who are gifted and have practiced the same art. The list would include individuals who are not worthy of imitation in every respect (e.g., Swift...

5. A godly satirist should study to learn the quantitative boundary between satire and scurrility, knowing from the outset that there is such a boundary. It is easy to pretend that there is no “logical” difference whatever between 37 lashes and 42 lashes, but the Scriptures say that the form...