More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
At the most basic level, forcible reclamation reclaims civil power outside of established procedures or ordinary transfer of power, and the people unseat civil rulers against the will (at least initially) of those rulers.
The people reclaim it not as the new wielders of civil power, for (as I said in the previous chapter) the people cannot themselves wield civil power; civil power must be deposited in definite political form for its exercise.
The purpose or end of revolution is not violence, nor is it to vanquish enemies of God or humanity, but to establish just and suitable arrangements for a peaceful and godly life.
The justness of any revolution, in terms of the justification to revolt, depends on whether conditions are actually tyrannical.
The question concerning Christians and violent revolution is not whether people can conduct revolution to establish a Christian nation, for force cannot generate a Christian nation. A Christian people share particular norms, customs, blood, etc., which are not easily forced upon them.
As we’ve seen, civil power is natural to man,
Being natural to man, it is for man, meaning that it serves a purpose for him—ordering him to temporal and eternal good.
When a legitimate ruler uses civil power to command what is just and the people disobey this command, they are disobeying God himself, not only because God requires obedience to civil rulers, but also, and more importantly, because the law itself, though human, is an ordinance of God.
Since no unjust command is an ordinance of God, no unjust command binds man’s conscience; only ordinances of God bind the conscience.
A] man commanding unjustly, and ruling tyrannically, hath, in that, no power from God.”
there is a distinction between the civil ruler as ruler and the civil ruler as a man—i.e., between his power and office in the abstract and the person himself.
Rutherford states, “the king in concreto, the man who is king, and the king in abstracto, the royal office of the king.”
nor do they cohere with the duties of his office. Thus, as Rutherford said, “[A]bused powers are not of God, but of men, and not ordinances of God; they are a terror to good works, not to evil; they are not God’s ministers for our good.”
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. xii. 4) for he is a 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; and is no more from God, but from sinful nature and the old serpent, than a license to sin.7
In each case, the principle is that when some superior acts in ways ill-fitting his office, he acts not as a superior but as a fellow man and, thus, as an equal, albeit under the pretense of superiority and authority. For this reason, the authority can be resisted as an aggressor, though he retains his title as father, military officer, ship captain, or civil leader.
not as an officer of the state but as a man to other men. The power he wields appears to be his officership, but this is accidental, and his subordinates are entitled to disobey.
The Tyrant One or two tyrannical acts do not make one a tyrant, just as one act of vice does not make one vicious.9 A tyrant is, as Althusius says, “one who, violating both word and oath, begins to shake the foundations and unloosen the bonds of the associated body of the commonwealth.”10
A tyrant is any civil ruler whose actions significantly undermine the conditions in which man achieves his true humanity or, as I’ve called it, the complete good.
Since the people resist an aggressor, revolution is a type of defensive war.
The people devolved civil power on civil rulers conditionally, and hence their power is a fiduciary power, possessed on the condition of just governance. The tyrant, having violated his oath to govern justly, is subjected to dispossession of civil power by those who gave him that power.
Aquinas similarly argued that a people can depose or restrict the power of a civil ruler who abuses his power:
Althusius argues that if some conditions permit marital divorce—a union that God declared “indissoluble”—then certainly there are conditions that permit a nation to separate from their magistrates:
A Christian is not less human on account of his possession of grace than a man who is without grace; he is a Christian human being.
In other words, the possession of grace does not fundamentally alter or replace the fundamental principles of civil life; and thus if man as man can reclaim civil power from tyrants, then so too can Christians.
Just as individuals have the right and duty of self-preservation and self-defense in the interest of their life and goods, so too does the nation, for both are moral entities.
Now, the tyrant as such is not a civil ruler but a sort of domestic enemy, an aggressor against the people.
The civil ruler who attacks true religion is not acting as a minister of God.
He is an enemy of his people’s good, an enemy of the human race, and an enemy of God.
Now, if to bear arms and to make war are lawful things, can there possibly be found any war more just than that which is, by the command of the superior, for the defense of the church, and the preservation of the faithful? Is there any greater tyranny than that which is exercised over the soul? Can there be imagined a war more commendable than that which suppresses such a tyranny?
Today, we contend with the soft power of liberalism—a power that has been remarkably effective at destroying religiosity in the West without firing a shot and without significantly undermining “religious liberty.”
guise of “freedom” and “toleration.”
A thousand nudges seemingly led Christians, largely willingly or at best begrudgingly, to confine their religion to churches, privatize religion, and surrender the public to hostile secularization.
Our secularized minds are shaped for it, and thus theological traditions that are clearly opposed to secularism had to be recast as its greatest adherents (e.g., modern two-kingdoms theology).
seek the approval of the godless to order their communities to God. The retreat to universality is an expression not of Christianity but of normalized modern liberalism, operating as a background assumption for Christian ethics, exegesis, and theology. It ought to be deconstructed.
Threatening religion is browbeaten by other Christians who find psychological comfort in being subservient to those who despise them.
This certainly is tyranny, though there isn’t, at first glance, a clear tyrant. We see a modern regime made up of politicians, bureaucrats, media, Hollywood, public intellectuals, academics, corporations, HR directors, public health officials, foundations, medical associations, etc. The regime is the tyrant.
Non-Christians living among us are entitled to justice, peace, and safety, but they are not entitled to political equality, nor do they have a right to deny the people of God their right to order civil institutions to God and to their complete good.
The Christian’s posture towards the earth ought to be that it is ours, not theirs, for we are co-heirs in Christ.
There many
Are
But their actions are limited and cannot properly be called acts of the people. Remember, the people require an agent of order. A mediating authority is necessary as that by which the people can act collectively.
VII. Conclusion Many want me to end with a word of caution, perhaps to reassure everyone that these are academic conclusions, that they are not serious. Instead, I’ll say this: It is to our shame that we sheepishly tolerate assaults against our Christian heritage, merely sighing or tweeting performative outrage over public blasphemy, impiety, irreverence, and perversity. We are dead inside, lacking the spirit to drive away the open mockery of God and to claim what is ours in Christ. We are gripped by a slavish devotion to our secularist captors. But we do not have to be like this. We have the
...more
