Pastors can admonish erring magistrates to correct injustice in the law, but pastors must not mistake their theological training or scriptural knowledge for expertise in jurisprudence. Pastors as pastors are no more competent to analyze or make civil law than any other private person. Now, a pastor can admonish his congregants to disobey a clearly unjust law, and he can exercise spiritual discipline over one who commits injustice in obeying that law. But his primary concern is not civil justice but souls. If civil laws forbid what is good and prescribe what is evil, they threaten the souls of
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