“The Bible is anti-revolutionary from cover to cover. While Christians must disobey the state when the state demands what the Bible forbids, or forbids what the Bible demands, we may not take up arms as individuals to protect against persecution.
Alternatively, lower territorial magistrates (like a state’s governor or city’s mayor), if they are Christian or Christian-influenced or otherwise law-based liberty-lovers, must protect citizens under their care from political tyranny at the hands of a larger political jurisdiction, but this is a principled, governmental military action, not individual retaliation or mob rule. Principled opposition to tyranny is precisely what happened at the American War for Independence, which is often wrongly identified as the “Revolutionary War.”
The French had a revolution. We did not.Individual Christians may not take up arms against the state, which is God’s minister. But we should pray and work for magistrates that will protect Christians (and all other citizens) from political tyranny.”
P. Andrew Sandlin
Public “Intellectual”
1.) Psst … Andy, doesn’t the Bible forbid persecution of Christians by the state?
So, we can take up arms to protect ourselves against persecution because the bible forbids persecution but we can’t take up arms because we are individuals protecting ourselves against persecution?
2.) Just to go on record… Andy’s opinion has not been universally shared by Reformed Theologians of the past. John Knox for example thought Andy all wet.
In John Knox’s “Appellations to the Nobility and Commonality of Scotland,” Knox extended to ordinary people the right—indeed the duty—to rebel against unjust rulers. As he told Queen Mary of Scotland later, “The sword of justice is God’s, and if princes and rulers fail to use it, others may.”
“In this idea (resistance to female rulers), a principle emerged that Knox would make more of in his “The Appellation” — he no longer considered tyrannicide as the exclusive mission of divinely inspired individuals, but the vocation of every saint who would assume it.”
Kyle & Johnson
John Knox; An Introduction to his Life and Work — pg. 99
What if the state merely supports the idolatrous practices of the church? Then the people must resist. Even lowly individuals — if they speak as God’s ambassadors — have the authority to rebuke princes for their transgressions…. the real treason was not to oppose idolatrous monarch to the death.
Kyle & Johnson
John Knox; An Introduction to his Life and Work — pg. 102
“Failure to resist idolatry incurs corporate guilt and will be punished collectively.”
John Knox
“Let a thing here be noted, that the prophet of God sometimes may teach treason against kings, and yet neither he nor such as obey the word, spoken in the Lord’s name by him, offend God.”
-John Knox
In “The Appellation” Knox denounced the orthodox doctrine of (that required) Christian obedience (to wicked rulers) as sinful. He declared blind compliance to a wicked command to be sin. God has not required obedience to rules when they decree impiety. To say that God does is no less blasphemy than to make God the author of sin. Moreover, if the nobles and people comply with their sovereign in manifest wickedness, they will be punished along with him.
In “The Appellation” Know also laid the foundation for the theme of his “Letter to the Commonality,” which declared “None provoking the people to idolatry ought to be exempted from the punishment of death.” The personal status of such an individual was of no consequence, be they monarch or commoner. Moreover, the punishment of idolatry and blasphemy does not pertain to only kings and rulers. Rather, it relates to all persons according to their Christian vocation and the opportunity afforded to them by God to administer vengeance. CITING DEUTERONOMY 13, KNOX ISSUED THE CALL FOR REVOLUTION — HE DIRECTED MOSES’ COMMANDMENT TO SLAY IDOLATERS TO ALL PEOPLE, NOT JUST T THE NOBLES.
Yet Knox never called for indiscriminate slaughter. He distinguished between the treatment to be accorded idolaters, who had never known ‘true religion,’ and those who had known it but has forsaken it.”
Kyle & Johnson
John Knox; An Introduction to his Life and Work — pg. 104
In “The Appellation,” Knox now gave the covenant new political implications. Previously, the covenant obligation only demanded separation from idolatry. But now the godly (nobles and people) must punish idolatry.
The covenant provided an important theological argument for Knox. It enabled him to overcome the idea that only the lesser magistrate can revolt, thus leading him to advocate popular rebellion as a means for removing idolatry and tyranny. Knox insisted that not only the magistrates, but the people are also bound by the covenant to uphold the rule of godliness and to revenge any injustices done to God’s majesty or laws. The covenant binds not only the chief rulers but the whole people to punish idolatry and tyranny.
Kyle & Johnson
John Knox; An Introduction to his Life and Work — pg. 105
3.) “The nature of wicked princes is much like to warthogs, which if they be suffered to have their snouts in the ground, and be not forthwith expelled, will suddenly have their snouts in all the body; So they if they be obeyed in any evil thing be it ever so little will be obeyed in all at length.”
John Ponet
Magisterial Reformer
4.) Romans 13 teaches that the civil authority is “the minister of God to thee for good”, that it is the “minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil” and that rulers “are not a terror to good works, but to the evil”. When the civil government becomes anti-Christian and defends all manner of wickedness while persecuting the righteous, then it is no longer “the minister of God to thee for good”, it is no longer “a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil” but it has become “a terror to good works”. In other words, it has become the opposite of the entity of which we are told that we “must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake”.
We do not owe obedience or subjection to any such Satanic monstrosity and we ought to oppose it any way that we are able to do so.
Perhaps Dr. P. Andy, in the future, should be a little more careful in making assertions?
