Douglas Wilson’s Letter from Moscow

On the Lam for Jesus

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

July 22, 2014

And of course we should all know that Christians ought not to be scofflaws. We are to be among the best citizens a magistrate ever had — we should be diligent and hard-working, dutiful and responsible, so that we might put to silence the ignorance of foolish men. We should bake the best cakes in Colorado, but not for the homo-fest, sorry.

But wait . . . doesn’t the Bible say that we must do whatever they say we must do — cakes, flowers, incense to Caesar, the works? Well, no (Acts 5:29).

“Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme; Or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well. For so is the will of God, that with well doing ye may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men: As free, and not using your liberty for a cloke of maliciousness, but as the servants of God. Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king” (1 Pet. 2:13–17).

So let’s take a look at some of the actions of the man who wrote those words — and not in order to charge him with hypocrisy.

“And, behold, the angel of the Lord came upon him, and a light shined in the prison: and he smote Peter on the side, and raised him up, saying, Arise up quickly. And his chains fell off from his hands. And the angel said unto him, Gird thyself, and bind on thy sandals. And so he did. And he saith unto him, Cast thy garment about thee, and follow me. And he went out, and followed him; and wist not that it was true which was done by the angel; but thought he saw a vision. When they were past the first and the second ward, they came unto the iron gate that leadeth unto the city; which opened to them of his own accord: and they went out, and passed on through one street; and forthwith the angel departed from him” (Acts 12:7–10).

Peter then went over to John Mark’s house, left a message, and disappeared from the book of Acts a wanted man, on the lam, with his picture in all the post offices.

This was what we might call a jailbreak, and it was not just a bit of innocent fun. The guards involved were executed for negligence they had not been guilty of (Acts 12:19), and yet, despite the seriousness of the issues, Peter did not consult with a bunch of modern Christians, who would have urgently advised that he turn himself in — citing, as they did so, with tears in their eyes, 1 Peter 2:13-17.

What we desperately need in these times of amoral chaos is recognize that the obedience of the Christian man will frequently be taken by tyrants as something other than the righteous obedience before God that it actually is. What did Jehoiada do? He honored the king. What did Athaliah call it? She called it treason (2 Kings 11:14). While we are not surprised that she would call it that, we are surprised that lots of modern Christian political theory listens to her.

I am reminded of that great line in Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood. “Sir, you speak treason!” “Fluently.”

So now let’s take a quick look at the man who wrote Romans 13.

“In Damascus the governor under Aretas the king kept the city of the Damascenes with a garrison, desirous to apprehend me: And through a window in a basket was I let down by the wall, and escaped his hands” (2 Cor. 11:32–33).

This is what we would call, in modern parlance, evading arrest, and, depending on how close the window was to the nearest gate, running a road block. The apostle Paul failed to show them his papers. He neglected to have those papers stamped. He didn’t pay the fee. And he did all this in full harmony with what he wrote for us to observe in that famed passage, “Romans 13.”

Who honored the royal dignity of King Saul more than David? And who was more uncooperative with Saul’s tyrannical designs than David? Had Romans 13 been written then, would we say that David honored it?

“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil. Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake. For for this cause pay ye tribute also: for they are God’s ministers, attending continually upon this very thing. Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour” (Rom. 13:1–7).

There are many things that need to be unpacked from this passage, but let me start with just two of them. That will do for starters.

First, the magistrate here is assumed to be operating to enforce a moral order that is not inverted. You see the same assumption in the passage from 1 Peter — “as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well.” These rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil (v. 3). Doing good wins their praise (v. 3). The magistrate is a minister of God for good (v. 4). He is an agent of wrath for those who do evil (v. 4). What they command lines up with the believer’s conscience (v. 5). We pay tribute because they work at doing good constantly (v. 6).

Second, the magistrate is called the servant of God three times in this passage. He is the minister (diakonos) of God (v. 4), and again, the diakonos of God (v. 4). The word diakonos is the word for deacon, servant. A few verses later, another word for servant is used (leitourgos).

Now, where do we go in Scripture to find out how to respond to rulers who punish the good and reward the evil, and who insist as a matter of dogma that there is no authority above them, that they are secular, the servants of no God? Anyone who believes that Romans 13 offers a blank check to tyrants is someone who simply has not read it carefully, and is not comparing Scripture with Scripture (Is. 5:20; Ps. 11:3).

There is a vast difference between the dutiful Christian citizen and the craven Christian who cites passages out of context in order to justify a continuation of his cowardice. There is no biblical way to be a friend of true authority without being, simultaneously, and for the same reasons, a deadly foe of tyranny. Never forget that Peter and Paul, the men who wrote the passages above, were both executed by authorities who abandoned the station assigned to them in Scripture.

When we come to understand their words as they understood them, we will be a lot closer to seeing how something like that could have happened. It was not all a big misunderstanding.

It turns out that it really is true — resistance to tyrants actually is submission to God.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

 The Mind of a Free Man

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

July 18, 2014

Villainy is not honest. I mean, c’mon.

This means that when rulers are ungodly, we should expect them to be like their father, the devil, who is the father of liars (John 8:44). When they lie, they speak their native language. Bitterness and cursing are under their tongue, but of course never at the press conference.

False teachers do not knock on your door with a brief case full of literature, and say, “Hello, I am here from the devil, and I have come to lead you into eternal torments.” That kind of stuff never makes it into the brochures.
False kings have confidence in the American people. They simper, flatter, and coo. They do what they do “for the children,” meaning of course the ones they haven’t chopped up — but all very constitutionally.

Now this is not just a character assessment. It has ramifications. And the ramifications directly affect, at the end of the day, our compliance. Or, I should say, if we are following the ramifications, our lack of compliance.

Think of it this way. We know that when they say same sex mirage is marriage, they are wrong. It isn’t. When they say that an unborn child, that rejected son or daughter, is just a lump of tissue, they are wrong. He or she isn’t. When they say that we can borrow trillions backed by nothing but the whistling wind, and grow wealthy thereby, they are wrong. We can’t.

All this is obvious to us, and it is why we are having the political conflicts we are having. But take it a step further.

These same people, these people to whom the truth is as rigid as their tongues, which is to say, not very, say things about their authority to impose their legal grotesqueries, and call it constitutional. But this is just as much a lie as the other stuff. Their cargo is two ton pallets of lies, but so is their flat bed truck. And they are just blowing down the road.

They say that what they are doing is constitutional. But it is not. They say that what they are doing is legal. But it is not. They say that what they are doing is lawful. They lie. They say that they have the authority to do these things. They do not. They say that we have to honor their decisions. We do not. God “frustrateth the tokens of the liars, and maketh diviners mad; that turneth wise men backward, and maketh their knowledge foolish;” (Is.

44:25).

In short form — and I know I will need to develop this further — Romans 13 does not apply. We do not have to dutifully honor illegal laws. We are not under the authority of the lie.

Before I develop it in weeks to come, conduct a thought experiment for yourself. Suppose the president appoints a czar, a czar of a task force that is called the We Don’t Care About the Constitution Task Force. They issue decrees and regulations, and, of course, promulgate stuff. They tell you that you and your family must comply with these Ridiculous Measures, and of course, you must do so because of the Crisis. Are you bound, or not?

I am talking about your conscience, and not about judgments of prudence. I might give a mugger my wallet without conceding his right to it, and I have no obligation to tell him about the five hundred dollars in my boot. I might hand over something to the government for the same reasons that I would hand over stuff to the pirates who had captured my ship.

Get the principle down first. They are lawless, and they lie about it.

Punching a Pimply Face

Contempt for Sharkey Law

Thursday, June 26, 2014
Douglas Wilson
Blog and Mablog

The difference between an unbelieving libertarian and an unbelieving leftist is quite simple to grasp. The unbelieving libertarian wants to go to Hell, and the unbelieving leftist wants to do the same thing, but wants me to pay for it.

Both need the gospel, and both present a problem for the evangelist. There is a spiritual problem in both instances. But the leftist, in addition to his spiritual problems, is also a public nuisance. He creates political and cultural problems, mostly having to do with various forms of coercion, compulsion, mandatory regulation, and forced labor for the pyramids. All these are covered by his all-purpose favorite euphemistic verb, which is “to ask.” We want to ask the well-off to pay their fair share. We want to ask small companies to provide health coverage they can’t afford. We want to ask the pyramid slaves to get their butts in gear.

They are the dyslexic party. They look at compulsion and read compassion.

Now none of this makes the libertine libertarian a fine fellow.
Pot-smokers are not going to build anything, much less the City of God. But while they may not be any help to us in what we are seeking to build, neither are they “asking” us to buy their pot for them. The problem they present — and it is one — can wait for another day.

But in the meantime, the idol of the state has a maw that can gulp down trillions of dollars at one go. It all began with disguised coercion, moved on to corruption and coercion, and it is now ending with open corruption and open coercion. We are rapidly approaching the point where the only reasonable response is open defiance.

The enlistment of the IRS as a partisan organization, designed to run interference against lawful political organization is an example of high wickedness. The president famously said there was “not a smidgen of corruption” with the IRS scandal. That’s right. It was not a smidgen, it was a smoking pile.

When the law shows open contempt for an honest citizenry, it is not long before that honest citizenry — in order to remain such — must show open contempt for what is being called “the law.” And for those Christians who are not well-read in the history of biblical civil disobedience, contempt for Sharkey-law is not the same thing as contempt for the rule of law. Just the reverse, actually.

“All right, all right!” said Sam. “That’s quite enough. I don’t want to hear no more. No welcome, no beer, no smoke, and a lot of rules and orc-talk instead” (The Return of the King, p. 977)

“What’s all this?” said Frodo, feeling inclined to laugh.
“This is what it is, Mr. Baggins,” said the leader of the Shirriffs, a two-feather hobbit: “You’re arrested for Gate-breaking, and Tearing up of Rules, and Assaulting Gate-keepers, and Trespassing, and Sleeping in Shire-buildings without Leave, and Bribing Guards with Food.”

And what else?” said Frodo.

“That’ll do to go on with,” said the Shirriff-leader.

“I can add some more, if you’d like it,” said Sam. “Calling your Chief Names, Wishing to punch his Pimply Face, and Thinking you Shirriffs look a lot of Tom-fools” (p. 978).

We The Sheeple

More Than Some Overdue Library Books 

Culture and Politics – Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, 07 March 2013

Kudos to Rand Paul for the filibuster on domestic drone strikes. The thing we have to understand about slippery slopes is that, if you have a ripe one, it is slippery all the way down.

The first thing to note is that Rand Paul was not engaging in a mere political stunt — he was utterly sincere about it, and the issue is no trifle. There are too many legitimate concerns about our developing despotism to be cool with no recognized constitutional limits on armed predator drones overhead. And, as I have said in other contexts when explaining why the 2nd Amendment covers shoulder-mounted missiles, we need something to shoot these things down with.

Now the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone, and so on, through the whole skeleton.
The potential for drone strikes on American citizens began with drone strikes on American citizens abroad, and that began with drone strikes on non-American enemy combatants, and that began with enemy combatant individuals with no defined enemy combatant state, and that began with Congress refusing to do its constitutional duty with a declaration of war on sovereign states that we intended to topple and replace. The slippery slope is slippery at the top also.

I understand the world is a messy place, and I get the fact that there are times when you cannot declare war on a sovereign state because the adversary is too nebulous. A declaration of war on a failed state like Somalia would be weird. But a declaration of war on Iraq would have been constitutional, and the way we overthrew Hussein was what thinkers of another era (lets just call them Founders) would have called unconstitutional.

Once lawlessness sets in, it is pretty hard to have controlled lawlessness, even though (especially though) that lawlessness is presided over by lawyers. Once lawlessness becomes standard procedure, it is hard to wax indignant at the other party’s use of the lawless measures that your party put in place.

Now in the spirit of understanding the messiness, I also get the fact that an American citizen can run over to the other side in a declared war and join their Navy, and that there is no need to treat him as though his was a stand-alone criminal case, while everybody else on their aircraft carrier is treated as though we were in a war. Fine. Sink the whole carrier, and if that one guy wanted the Bill of Rights to apply to him, he should have thought of that before going on board.

But having granted that, anybody who cannot see the slow, progressive slide into a global, internationalist regulatory gummint by decree is simply not paying attention. Governments derive their legitimacy through the consent of the governed, and not through the machinations of international bankers, corporate lawyers, and the empty suits that maneuver their way into Congress.

The Bill of Rights is chock-a-block with careful definitions, and it is that way for a reason. The reason is that men with power are sinful men with power, and sinful men with power needs checks on their power that they will believe to be intolerable. They will believe that anyone who would check their power in this way is the enemy of all good governance. Well, tough.

As much as I admire Rand Paul’s filibuster, we are way past the point where such things will be sufficient in themselves. There are many evangelical Christians whose closest brush with the law has involved some overdue library books. There is a godly and dutiful Christian citizenship in this, but, it must also be said, there is an element of “we, the sheeple” in it.

We desperately need to develop and articulate a theology of Christian resistance. From time to time, I will be contributing what I can.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Nullification or Nutterfication? 

Culture and Politics – Obama Nation Building
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, 10 July 2012

If your kayak is going over the falls, then the mainstream is the last place you would want to be. I say this because “mainstream” is not automatically a term of praise. At the same time, nobody wants to be a nutter just for grins, and so allow me to lay down some basic principles of Christian resistance to the kind of soft despotism we are up against.

By “soft” despotism, incidentally, I am talking about style, not results. Brave New World was every bit as hard and coercive as 1984, but soma was more fun for the recipient than having a jackboot in your face. Liberty is just as gone in either case. Sometimes hard seems hard, and sometimes it doesn’t. But it always is hard.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>7 Reasons Your Taxes Will Go Up

Culture and Politics – Obama Nation Building
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, April 26, 2010

Or rather, 7 reasons your taxes will go up if you let them . . .

1. The first reason is that politicians say they won’t, and politicians need to lie about things like this. The most recent instance of this was Obama’s promise that if you make under 250K your taxes will go up no how, no way. He is now considering a VAT tax, which will soak everybody.

2. If the VAT tax is added, that doesn’t mean that the other taxes will disappear. H.L. Mencken put it this way. “When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that an old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had only one before.” And the two forms of taxation added together will be a tax increase, even if one or the other of them happens to go down. And the two component taxes won’t necessarily go down.

3. We do not yet understand where the greed really is. In our public discourse, greed is still defined as people wanting to keep their own money, and it is never, ever defined as oily functionaries wanting to take that money away from them. In the Bible, greed is wanting to take other people’s money. In our current perverse system, those who want to do that are “the altruistic ones,” and those who are not so sure are the greedy ones. Those who object to the nature of our tax system are still way too defensive about this. But we ought not to have any trouble recognizing that our taxes are too high, too complicated, and utterly unjust and corrupt. The same three things apply to those who levy the taxes.

4. Following up on one element of #3, the officials who make these atrocious decisions have sandbagged themselves into pretty secure positions. Turnovers in the Senate are comparable to the rate of turnovers in the old Politburo. The officials are too “high” — they are like gargoyles on a cathedral, out of reach, ugly, and hard to knock off. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try!

5. In the olden days, the moral authority rested with those who, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, said that they liked to pay taxes because it was the price of civilization. In these modern times, when some of us are starting to wonder just how much more civilization we can take, the situation is different. When tax rates are at a just level, Holmes has a plausible and compelling argument. But when they get the way they are now, the moral authority needs to shift. It needs to shift because our current tax code is simply legalized plunder, and it is immoral to support legalized plunder. But the moral authority, while it is in the process of shifting on this issue, has not yet shifted completely. We need to return to the common wisdom of Calvin Coolidge, who said that “collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery.”

6. We still think that our tax code is sensible because we think we have not yet gotten to the levels of Peter the Great in the early 18th century. He taxed births, funerals, beds, kitchen chimneys, firewood, and mustaches. We are not at that ridiculous point, or so we think. But we do pay taxes when we flip a light switch, flush a toilet, make a phone call, and so on. The difference is that our governments have figured out how to collect a multitude of taxes surreptitiously. If everybody got a bill on Wednesday for all the taxes they are currently paying for, and it was all clearly itemized, the tax revolt would begin promptly on Thursday morning, 8 a.m.

7. Tax revolt movies are not yet popular. But Robin Hood is due to be released soon — and since we have a budding tax revolt, one that likes costumes, we shall see how many Robin Hood outfits start showing up at tea parties. King John of Robin Hood fame was forced to sign the Magna Carta, and he promised that he would not raise taxes without consulation with others, unless it was for ransoming his own person, making his eldest son a knight, or for marrying off his eldest daughter. Those are reasonable exceptions, I think. I can live with that. So let us wait and see how many Robin Hood costumes join up with the Founding Father costumes.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>Tax Cheats
Culture and Politics – Obama Nation Building
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, April 21, 2010

When considering the subject of our duty to pay taxes, the Bible seems plain enough. But let’s consider the difference a few italics can make.

“For for this cause pay ye tribute also: for they are God’s ministers, attending continually upon this very thing. Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour” (Romans 13:6-7).

Now try it this way:

“For for this cause pay ye tribute also: for they are God’s ministers, attending continually upon this very thing. Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour” (Romans 13:6-7).

Now I am making a general point here, and am not giving you advice on your own personal taxes. I am not a tax attorney, and I do not play one on television.

We need to get the theology of this thing straight first. If governments can steal, then they can obviously do so through the tax code. Tax codes can be passed illegally and unjustly. Legislators can be bribed to get them to vote for it. The agents charged with enforcement can throw aside all biblical rules of evidence, and so on. If this can in fact happen, and it clearly can, then there are circumstances in which a tax dispute between the government and the citizenry is a dispute which exists because the government is cheating on taxes.

In other words, we should not assume that whenever the government says that money is owed, and blood-donating turnip says that it isn’t, that it is the turnip who is cheating. In short, the biggest tax cheat in America today is the federal government.

Governments exist by covenant, and governments like ours explicitly claim to exist by covenant. The word federal comes from the Latin word foedus, which means covenant. Our founding documents say that the government draws its authority to govern from the consent of the governed. That consent can be withdrawn, and when it is, the process is frequently quite messy. But messy or not, it can be withdrawn. And, like it or not, I think that we are already into the process of it being withdrawn.

The problem is that whenever this obvious truth about governmental tax cheats is pointed out (and it is an obvious truth), certain independent-minded tax resisters charge off and stop paying their taxes all by their own selves. And while (in some cases) I admire the courage and tenacity involved, tactical wisdom is almost always entirely absent. Tactically, this kind of thing is actually a boon to the the organized tax cheats — for whom it is child’s play to make the disorganized tax cheats look like they are the real problem here.

Moreover, it makes resistance seem futile. Nothing is easier than for the feds to pick off this guy, who thinks taxes can’t be paid with Federal Reserve Notes, and that guy, who thinks that the income tax is not really in the Constitution because Ohio never ratified it properly, and the other guy over there, who formed an independent republic with his buddies at a hunting cabin in Montana, and in their republic they don’t have income taxes.

What is necessary here is for us to return to Calvin’s doctrine of the lesser magistrates. Since the Enlightenment, we have been trained to think of the nation/state as a monolithic entity, indivisible, instead of thinking of magistrates holding office as individuals with personal and individual responsibilities to defend the law. When someone takes an oath of office to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign or domestic, is it possible for said enemy to be an office holder, and to be an office holder senior to the person who took the oath? If the answer is yes, then what is the oath-taker supposed to do?

Run this scenario. Suppose Obamacare is upheld in the federal courts, and they then move to implementation. Suppose at that point one of the states, Texas, let us say, resurrects the old doctrine of state nullification. Let us say that the governor and legislature of Texas together say that this bill is an unconstitutional monstrosity, which is true enough, and they declare it null and void within the state of Texas. That being the case, they call upon the citizens of Texas to refrain from filing their income taxes in the coming year. Now what?

My point is a very limited one here. If that were to happen, what would the duty of Christians be? No, I am not arguing that it would be our duty to move to Texas. I am talking about Christians who are living in Texas already. What does Romans 13 require of them? Taxes to whom taxes are due, and Texas to whom Texas is due.

When a magistrate tells you to disobey a magistrate, what then? It is too facile to say that must always obey the highest one in the hierarchy, the one named Yertle, because in the American system, the consent of the governed is the highest one in the hierarchy. One man in the grip of historical arcana about the Constitution is not obviously the voice of the people. But if this sentiment were expressed in an orderly way, by millions of people, through the existing magistrates, then the situation is entirely different.

What to do now? Well, it seems to me that this is a reasonable question to ask candidates for state and local office, in the next round of elections. “Do you believe that someone in the office you are aspiring to has the right and responsibility to protect the people he represents from an overweening, centralized government, and to provide them with a lawful avenue for resisting such encroachments? Why or why not?”

>Doug Wilson’s Letter From America

>Legalized Plunder
Culture and Politics – Obama Nation Building
Written by Douglas Wilson
Sunday, April 18, 2010

Here it is, in a nutshell. The state is either under authority or it is not. If the state is not under authority, it has no authority — only power. That means that prudence might dictate doing what they say, but conscience never could. So the only way conscience can direct the citizenry to obey the state’s authority is if the state itself is under authority. No created entity has authority unless that created entity is under authority. But if the state is under authority, this means the state is under limits.

Being under limited authority means that it is possible to know the nature and extent of those limits. If they go past those limits, everybody knows about it.

If there is no God above the state, the state has no authority. If there is a God above the state, then the state has no authority outside the limits that have been set for it. And in either case, there is no reason grounded in conscience for putting up with legalized plunder.

>Doug Wilson’s Letter From America

>An Armed Deacon of God
Expository – Romans
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, April 17, 2010

Introduction
We are taking care to work through this passage of Scripture deliberately and slowly, and there are at least two reasons for this. First, the issues involved are complex and important, and are even more complex and important in our day than they usually are. Second, the misunderstandings that surround this portion of Scripture are legion. We have to be very careful here.

The Text
“For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil. Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake” (Rom. 13:4-5).

Summary of the Text
Contextually, we are talking about civil rule, civil power. Paul has called the magistrate the “powers that be.” The word here is the word for authority. All authorities whatever are from God (v. 1), and so it follows that civil authorities are from God (v. 1). The word is authority in vv. 1-2, and in verse 3, Paul calls those we are dealing with here “rulers.” What kind of rulers we are talking about becomes plain here in vv. 4-5, given their tools and what they do with them.

For he (the ruler) is a minister of God, a deacon of God, and his assigned task is to do the Christian citizen or subject good (v. 4). If a person is an evildoer, then he should be worried and afraid, because the ruler does not bear the sword in vain (v. 4). He is again called the deacon of God, and his job is to execute vengeance and wrath upon evildoers (v. 4). The Christian needs to be obedient to the law, not just because he is afraid of this wrath (v. 5), but also because he is being obedient to God—that is, for conscience sake (v. 5).

A Task and A Tool
God has given these rulers two things—a task and a tool. The assigned task is to administer avenging justice to those who do evil, and the tool for this task is the sword, an instrument of lethal violence. The word for sword here is machaira, and it was an instrument of warfare. It was not used for spanking bad boys with the flat of it. This was a double-edged sword, usually about 18 inches long, and commonly used by Roman soldiers. Peter used one to cut off an ear (Matt. 26:47); James the brother of John was executed with one (Acts 12:2); however sharp, it is incapable of separating us from the love of Christ (Rom. 8:35); it provides us with a figure for the Word of God (Eph. 6:17; Heb. 4:12). It was not a toy, and God gave it to His civil deacons to kill bad people with. However much our pacifist brothers might sweat over this passage, it says what it says, and it is not in the Old Testament.

Vengeance Is Still the Lord’s
Remember that this book is written just a few years before a rebellion breaks out against the Romans. The Jews, who would erupt in rebellion, were under a prophetic statement as old as Moses that they would lose this battle, and that God would humiliate them through a people of strange language because vengeance for all their idolatries belonged to Him. The Christians were being instructed here that under no circumstances were they to join in with this revolt. If God is coming after a people with vengeance in His eye, don’t you jump in between them.

From this circumstance, we can and should render general by induction. After all the Romans and all the Jewish rebels were dead and gone, there were still evildoers in the world who needed to be restrained generally, and they need to be restrained by force. One of the three uses of the law is to give guidance to the magistrate as he considers what to do (1 Tim. 1:9-11). All we are doing here is distinguishing the first century application from our own (necessary) applications—to muggers, terrorists, rapists, and so on. We won’t need the sword anymore when we don’t have crime anymore.

What It Means to be a Deacon
So the state is God’s deacon (Rom. 13:4), and God never leaves His deacons without instructions. A deacon is, by definition, under authority. In the biblical worldview, authorities are authorities only because they are under authority.

We should therefore measure his appropriations and expenditures over against what he was told to do. When servants use the master’s resources for tasks unassigned by him (Luke 12:46-47), what is the result? When the Lord comes back to evaluate His deacons in the Congress, what will He do? He will not be indiscriminate; the punishments will fit the crimes. Some He will cut in sunder, and others will simply be beaten with many stripes. This will not happen because our rulers are not His deacons; rather, it will happen because they are.

By definition, the armed deacons in this passage of Romans are under authority. Their authority does not originate with them, as much as they would like it to. Whose authority are they under? God’s. We obey them because God tells us to (for conscience sake), and not simply because we fear their punishments for wrongdoing. And if they are levying punishments for righteousness, we are not to fear them at all—and conscience is still operative.

A Hermeneutic of Fun
The apostle Paul tells the believers of his day that he advises against marriage because of the “present distress” (1 Cor. 7:26). He also is telling believers here in our text to stand back and let the Romans do to Jerusalem what they are going to do to it (Rom. 12:19; 13:). And yet, many believers have abstracted his principle here in the latter instance, and applied it to every situation throughout all time, which they haven’t done to the first passage—which was just as contextually situated. And why is this? We grasp the importance of limiting context in 1 Corinthians because it is fun to get the girl. A lot more fun, say, than standing up to tyrants is.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>Meum and Tuum
Culture and Politics – Obama Nation Building
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, April 13, 2010

So let’s come at this from another angle. We are talking about whether governments can steal, and once that seemingly obvious point is settled, at what point their taking becomes pillage. And the brief answer is that it become indefensible when they can’t defend what they are doing from the Word of God.

In City of God, Augustine tells the story of a pirate who was captured and brought before Alexander the Great, and boldly asked why he was called a pirate for doing with one ship to other ships what Alexander with great armies to other nations. We lose track of what happened to the witty pirate after that, but his question is manifestly a reasonable one.

“What would it be called if we did that?” is a reasonable way to begin the discussion.
If the directors the Ponzi-scheme Social Security program were in the private sector, they would all be down the hall from Bernie Madoff. This is not a radical anarchist question either. There are times when the magistrate can answer the question — e.g. “you can’t take personal vengeance on your enemies because God has given the sword of vengeance to us.”

Someone might object that I intruded the Scriptures into the equation, making it impossible for us to determine what is right and wrong for the magistrate to do apart from God’s Word to us. And that would be correct. We are sinners. We need Christ. We need Christ individually, and we need Christ collectively. We need Christ preached in our pulpits and offered on our communion tables, we need Christ remembered and honored around our family dinner tables, and we need Christ in the public square.

What is the American problem? What is the American dilemma?

“If we have forgotten the name of our God, or stretched out our hands to a strange god; Shall not God search this out? for he knoweth the secrets of the heart” (Psalm 44: 20-21).

We have forgotten the name of our God, and that is why we don’t even know what stealing is anymore.

There are three basic governments that God has established among men. The overweening state wants one government, overseeing atomistic individuals. Those individuals are all dumped into a statist sack, which has the structural integrity of a bean bag chair. Each individual can be isolated — easily — by the state if he becomes obstreperous. This is why the behavior of solitary tax protester types is so easy for the civil totalizers to deal with. It is the atom against the collective.

A biblical civilization rests upon Burke’s little platoons, which in turn spin out of the three governments mentioned above. God created the family, God created civil order, and God created the church. When Paul says that no authority exists except what God has established, he did not say that all the authority was located in one spot, or that all of it had been invested in one man, parked on one throne. God has more than one deacon.

The family is His Ministry of Health, Education, and Welfare. The civil order is His Ministry of Justice. The church is His Ministry of Grace and Truth. That’s the basic set-up. Dislocations begin to manifest themselves when any one of these established governments get above themselves and try to usurp functions that God assigned to the others. The church did this in the middle ages, the family has done it in times of tribal wars and feuds, and the state is doing it now.

When authority is decentralized, and located in small, interlocking entities (families, churches, townships, nations, volunary societies, etc.), then the strength of that society is molecular. This can happen in a healthy way only when Christ is the point of integration, when Christ is acknowledged as the one in whom all things hold together (Colossians 1:17). When a secular state tries to hold us all together, the necessary results will be brittle, authoritarian, and oppressive. These men refuse to rule in the name of Jesus, and this is why they do not know what justice is. This is why they do not have even the most basic grasp of the differences between meum and tuum (between what belongs to me and what belongs to you).

>Doug Wilson’s Letter from America

>The Pin Doesn’t Have to Be Big

Culture and Politics – Obama Nation Building
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, April 01, 2010

A former student wrote me about my “ten-point theology of resistance” to Obamascare and, boiled down, the question had to do with how all this relates to what we have taught here in Moscow for years about the centrality of worship. There are some related questions, but they all revolve around that one. Since I didn’t think he would be the only one with that question, I thought I would post something about it here.

We have taught for many years that worship is warfare, and so the question is “how does this kind of practical “active resistance” tie in with that?” Another related emphasis of ours is that theology comes out your fingertips, and whatever comes out of your fingertips is your theology. A regular feature of my prayers is that in our worship services we would (in the power of the Spirit) ascend into the heavenly places and glorify Jesus Christ there. Having done so, that we would be in a position to ask God to glorify the name of Christ on earth, as we just finished glorifying His name in Heaven. This is how I believe the kingdom comes — “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” It is the will of God that Jesus Christ be glorified. As we glorify the Lord in Heaven, the Father glorifies Him on earth, all through the power of the Spirit, and as this unfolds, the kingdom comes.

But as the kingdom comes, there is a point where it, you know, comes . . . as in, shows up.

Another feature of my prayers is that our people would establish the rhythm of their lives around the worship of God on the Lord’s Day, and that each week we would pour the foundation of the structure that will be built in the week that follows. I pray that everything we do — education, business, arts, kite-flying, poetry, mercy work, political engagement and anything else — would be self-consciously built on that foundation. But surely it would be odd if this were the prayer of many years, and yet no poems ever got written, no businesses started, no kites flown. To change the metaphor, at some point you have to start letting the clutch out. In the realm of politics, there comes a point where you do this (pointing to a particular political action) because of that (pointing to the worship service). If this does not happen, then the centrality of worship is nothing but over-blown language, Christian kidding themselves on Sundays.

In my ten-point post, my reference to gospel-preaching (and worship is a central form of gospel proclamation) did come last, but not because it was an insignificant add-on. In my mind, it is and always will be the sine qua non. Without it, everything else is just heaps of vanity.

So why this, why now? Why is Obamascare the trip wire? And what should Canadian and British Christians do, as their health care system is already a fait accompli? Do they have an equal responsibility to “actively resist?” Well, yes and no. The battle goes differently at different places along the line of battle. A faithful soldier can have many different responsibilities, depending on his circumstances — advance, retreat, or just hold on. But those responsibilities should not include listening to the propaganda broadcasts from the enemy on the radio, and believing them. When it comes to comparisons, we should use a reasonable calculus and not a carnal calculus. This is because sometimes Frodo turns out to be a more important guy than Boromir.

The last question is this: why is this health care bill so important? “Yeah, it’s bad, but shouldn’t we just keep our heads down, and continue to labor on building up the church?” Two points — a church crammed full of people who think this kind of thing is acceptable is not a built up church, but rather a compromised one. And second, the reason for politically-engaged Christians to take action here is this. When Reagan sent the troops into Grenada, it was an insignificant move militarily, but it had a monumental impact. Up to that point, the communists had the “irresistible force of history” argument on their side, and a reversal (however tiny) was enough to puncture that illusion. When the balloon is big, the pin doesn’t have to be. Statism seeks to operate using the same illusion. There is a real chance that this health care mess will be first defunded in 2010 and repealed in 2012. If it is, a major illusion (the inevitability of statist progression) will be undone. And if that happens, the new opportunities for the church will be enormous.