The Word Is Getting Out

CHRISTIAN GOVERNMENT, CHRISTIAN LAW, AND GODLY COERCION TO SAVE THE LOST

God created society to preserve and improve the human race. God created government and law to preserve and improve society. Every person assumes as true some favored concept of or belief about what is good and what is evil, and what is just and unjust; and every society and its government are based on some such prevalent conception or belief.

Because of man’s fallen and sinful nature, and his finitude and fallibility of mind, all human governments in this earthly life lie somewhere — far away from the perfect — on the spectrum of Godliness to ungodliness, of truth to error, and of good to evil.

In this best possible created world, God so ordered things that, as John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) taught in his Disquisition on Government, society and government flow naturally and inevitably out of the constitution or nature of man. This explains why anarchy and personal isolation from society are unnatural and unsustainable, being fundamentally contrary to human survival and flourishing. Moreover, having foreseen the Fall, God ordered things so that much of the resultant sin and vice, by a mysterious and invisible-hand process, or by what Hegel (1770-1831) called “the cunning of reason” in history, this sin and vice would be transformed into salutary institutions and laws.

Giambattista “John-the-Baptist” Vico (1688-1744), the great Christian philosopher of history, in his New Science, taught that fallen and unregenerate man embodies three great vices — ferocity, avarice, and ambition — that, if left unchecked, would destroy all mankind on the face of the earth. But God, in His deep and wise ordering of things for the good of His elect, the invisible Church, made it so that the legislation by men that wisely considers man as he actually is creates civil happiness by mysteriously and miraculously generating from these three vices, respectively, the military, merchant, and governing classes, and thereby the strength, riches, and wisdom of commonwealths.

According to Vico, proof that there is divine providence and a divine legislative mind is exhibited in how, out of the sinful passions of men each bent on his private advantage, for the sake of which they would live like wild beasts in the wilderness, God’s providence has made the civil institutions by which they may live in human society.

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So the ultimate purpose of government in this earthly life, as compared with government after Judgment in the state of eternity — is to restrain the wicked for the sake of God’s elect, the body of Christian believers past, present, and future. When operating as it should during this earthly life, government shields the innocent as they are being tested during their earthly pilgrimage in the midst of the ravenous unbelieving wicked. This is why Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), in his Leviathan, called his hypothetical state of nature, where no government and civil society exist, a condition where each man wars continuously against every other, and where human life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

So while believers, by HIs grace, in their fundamental spiritual essence, are governed FROM WITHIN by His Law implanted in their hearts; unbelievers, in their essence, are lawless and must therefore be restrained FROM WITHOUT by external government. But after the Judgment, by God’s righteous separation and segregation of the elect and the reprobate into two unconnectable realms, no need of such restraint will exist.

So the salutary institutions, including laws and government, referenced by Vico, use compulsion or coercion to in some degree mitigate and moderate sinful passion in the reprobate and in fleshly believers, for the sake of public order and personal protection (including property). In this way, sinful man’s fear of punishment by that great controlling power that is government — a blessed proxy from God — makes civil society possible. Without such salutary compulsion or coercion, the human race would, in short order, perish by the violence and exposure resulting from that chronic, acute, inevitable, and terminal disorder endemic to anarchy.

But government, as Calhoun taught, is about more than securing merely the survival of the human race. It is also about improving the race — materially, intellectually, and morally, to His Glory. To achieve such improvement, measured and prudentially-implemented Godly coercion by human government is needed. And this is why, contrary to the counter-Scriptural claims of apolitical quietists and pacifists, the Lord has his elect children pray, “on earth as in heaven.” And so earthly government and law is to become more Christian, and such better law and government is to play a key role in glorifying HIs name and growing His church.

In this vein, the great theologian Bonaventure (c.1217-1274) aptly called the Christian’s becoming more Christ-like “exemplarism”; and he called the Christian departing this troubled world to be with his Lord in heaven “consummation.”

And while here on earth, the Christian is commanded to be salt and light in witnessing to His Truth and Goodness, to be a Godly leaven in society and government, and even, to avenge in somewise disobedience to the Lord (2 Corinthians 10:6), while not avenging harm to himself (Romans 12:19).

So, by these commands, He avenges for us, and we Christians, in somewise, are to avenge for Him: and thereby He teaches us selflessness and solicitude for others. For in our finitude we are eminently vulnerable to injury, physical and especially spiritual; but God, in His infinite perfections, is untouchable. And while His kingdom is not of this world, since it encompasses all creation, each Christian, during his appointed earthly span, is commanded and obliged to witness fully to the Lord in ALL facets and arenas of earthly life, and to willingly and freely suffer persecution for Truth’s sake, to His glory, by which and in which man, paradoxically, derives his highest joy.

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“What you believe is what you are” — is a very sobering truth; especially if one is fundamentally in error.
And of course, those who take being in truth or in error lightly are typically those fatally oblivious to this truth, up until Judgment.

And beliefs, as expressed in words, actions, and living in general, have, by their moral influence, impact on and consequences for self and for others That said: Should adults be held accountable for and even punished for holding erroneous views on fundamental moral-existential subjects, by human authorities and prior to the final, Divine Judgment? In answer to this question, the carnally-minded “live and let live” libertarian world says, of course, “No!” But never mind that, because the All-Wise and All-Good God — the Creator and Judge of libertarians — says, emphatically, “Yes!”, because, from those to whom more has been given by Him, more is expected (Luke 12:48). Or as the great Southern writer Richard Weaver (1910-1963) put it: ideas have consequences. And coercion, for good or for ill, is a principal cause of the ideas we hold to be true and false.

The use of coercion — both physical and mental — to promote good and to suppress evil is a central theme of the Bible, God’s written Word, in both testaments.

The Apostle Paul, before his conversion, was a notorious Christian-killer and persecuting Pharisee. On the road to Damascus, the Lord Jesus Christ, God in the Person of the Son, used bodily coercion on Saul — blinding him and knocking him to the ground — as preparation for His turning his will away from self and toward the one and only true (Triune) God. Citing Paul’s conversion as an instance of salutary coercion, Augustine of Hippo (354-430) observes: “It is wonderful how he who entered the service of the gospel in the first instance under the compulsion of bodily punishment, afterwards labored more in the gospel than all they who were called by word only.”

This raises the question of the voluntariness, or involuntariness, of Christian conversion in general. The fallen man, in the state of sin and misery into which he is born, cannot save himself. As a man dead in trespasses, self-salvation is not an option. So God, and God alone, does the saving of His elect. But does the second great commandment, to love one’s neighbor as one’s self, mean that Christians may and indeed should employ coercive means to move unbelieving neighbors away from evil and toward God the Good? Put another way: Are unbelievers to be rescued, even against their will; and how can that be, since the door of hell is locked from the inside; that is, it is fallen man’s rebellious and misdirected will that separates him from God and bars him from entry into heaven?

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The Bible clearly states, as we shall see below, that physical coercion, including the threat thereof, is permissible and indeed requisite to properly raising children. Parental coercion rightly done — with fairness, moderation, and due measure — is an indispensable part of true and virtuous parental loving. Thus, “Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him” (Prov. 13: 24). Indeed, the sparing of the rod is condemned by our All-good and All-knowing God as gross, unloving, and hateful negligence.

But of course, the world, and especially, our modern world, in its lost and evil tenderness toward and outright advocacy of carnal feeling, opposes both the corporal punishment of children and the physical coercion of adults away from evil and toward the good.

The way of the modern, libertarian, unbelieving world is to condemn all coercion, or coercion per se, regardless of the purported reason or end-object of the coercion. In this way, carnal and unbelieving minds generate and propound elaborate false philosophies to legitimate — not by sound reasoning but by corrupt rationalization — rebellion against God. The goal of socially liberal or “hippie” libertarianism, along with its ultimate end-state position, atheist communism, is to fend off true or Biblical moral criticism and correction of narrowly selfish or carnal life and living.

These lost and weak and effete libertarians define government as that institution in society with a monopoly on the use of coercive force within a given geographical territory. (And these libertarians themselves are divided among purist anarchists and compromising minimal-statists.) On the other hand, liberals today, as compared with libertarians, believe in using governmental coercion to proactively push evil and to suppress the good. Unlike the libertarian, the liberal embraces carnal government as his god — made in his own image — on earth. But these “no-government” and “government-for-evil” positions are wrong because both are contrary both to human nature and Divine intent.

Government has been best defined, by John C. Calhoun, as that CONTROLLING POWER, of whatever particular form — whether monarchical, aristocratical, or democratic, or some combination of these — which was ordained by God to protect and perfect society.

But our main concern here, in this essay, is not government in general, but rather, specifically Christian government — government that, by the letter and spirit of its laws, and by the moral trajectory and influence of its officers, is palpably, identifiably, and conspicuously infused with His written Word, and which vigorously and zealously aims, as a human-institutional manifestation of God’s grace, to save, edify, and safeguard the souls of citizens.

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The project of compelling, by human government, the lost toward good and away from evil, to be successful, must take into account, of course, the fallibility and susceptibility to corruption of both the legislator and the executive or enforcer. The British historian Lord Acton (1834-1902), paraphrasing from Calhoun’s South Carolina Exposition and Protest (1828), famously said, “Power corrupts, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.”

Also, the Christian legislator must effectively consider, or factor into his statesmanship equation, the limited moral and mental receptivity, and the tendency to recalcitrance, resistance, and outright rebellion, of the lost. This relation between the Christian ruler and the lost is itself a reflection writ small of the basic cosmic relation between infinite, perfect God and finite, sinful man. And the philosopher Leibniz (1646-1716), in his Christian work Theodicy, has done the most to explain the limited receptivity of finite man to God’s infinite goodness and greatness.

But, many centuries earlier, Aristotle (384-322 BC), as if in anticipation of the fuller Christian revelation, in his Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, said that the aim of legislation is the fostering of virtue, and that happiness is activity in accordance with virtue. And a virtue, like courage or moderation or wit, is a strength or power, a Golden Mean between vicious extremes, an acquired habit or disposition toward the good. Courage, for example, is a mean between cowardice and rashness; and wit is a mean between boorishness and buffoonery. And having defined man, by the logical method of genus and differentia, as a rational and political animal (“zoon politikon”), Aristotle observed how man, when perfectly virtuous, is the best of animals; but without law and justice he is the worse, since he, by his reason, can devise weapons to satisfy his lusts and savagery, which other animals cannot.

Later, Archbishop Isidore of Seville (c.560-636 AD), widely regarded as “the last scholar of the ancient world”, nicely summarized that “laws should be worthy, fair, possible of enforcement and of obedience according to nature and to the customs of the land, suited to the place and time, needed, useful, clear (so it can’t trap people in its obscurity), serving no private interest but framed for the general good of all citizens.”

But it was Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, who has come closest to understanding the great complexity of God’s providence as it relates to government and law. He shrewdly noted how human law can’t afford to punish or forbid ALL wrongdoing: it can only do so by also forbidding a great deal of good and hindering much that serves the general good of human social intercourse. So, we humans needed in addition a law of God that could leave no wrongdoing unforbidden and unpunished.

In the same vein, Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-1274), in his Summa Theologiae, said that civil laws necessarily let many things pass unfinished which God’s plan must put right. Laws must fit the human condition and be possible according to nature and the customs of the land. For the non-virtuous cannot do the same things as the virtuous, nor children the same as grown-ups. To be just, laws must serve the general good, must not exceed the lawmaker’s authority, and must fairly apportion the burdens of the general good amongst all members of the community.

Aquinas notes how in evil men both ways of being subject to eternal law are decayed as it were: the natural, God-created tendency to virtue spoilt by vice, and the natural knowledge of what is good darkened by passion and habitual wrongdoing. On the other hand, good men share the eternal law more perfectly in both ways: to their natural knowledge of what is good is added faith and wisdom, and to their natural tendency to do good is added the interior stimulus of grace and virtue.

Aquinas also noted that some wrongdoing is specially called UNNATURAL because it goes against even animal nature: homosexual acts, for example, which run counter to the natural mode of intercourse between male and female.

And man finds moral training hard work on his own. For those blessed by God with good natural temperaments and customs, parental training by admonition is enough; but those who are rebellious and prone to vice and unresponsive to words have to be kept from evil by force or fear, so that others at least are left in peace, and they themselves gradually start doing from choice what earlier they did from fear and so grow virtuous. And here we see Aquinas citing a positive, soul-shaping role for coercion.

Building on Augustine, Aquinas emphasizes that too extensive suppression of sin by government and law tends to trigger greater outbreaks of sinning. “Human law aims at human virtue, but step by step, not all at once; to insist on a degree of perfection that most people cannot manage would only cause them to break out in worse wrongdoing”, a subtle truth confirmed by historical experiments in Christian theocracy, including, for example, Calvin’s Geneva, Cromwell’s Republic, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

But fallen humanity ever-tends to fall even further. It ever-tends to collapse back on and to legitimate the devilishly carnal. Indeed, we see legitimation doctrines cooked up by figures as culturally and racially disparate as the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) and the Arab prophet Mohammed (c.570-632). Hume, an atheist-skeptic, in his History of England, goes too far in criticizing Puritan England and in celebrating the return to a Stuart king and the Church of England. In his hatred of true or Reformed Christianity, Hume the “moral philosopher” uncritically embraced the moral laxness and error endemic to traditional and highly-carnal common life.

And Aquinas himself, the great Christian theologian, saw right through the adolescent religious farce that is Islam. Aquinas wrote: “He (Mohammed) seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure to which the concupiscence of the flesh urges us. His teaching also contained precepts that were in conformity with his promises, and he gave free rein to carnal pleasure. In all this, as is not unexpected; he was obeyed by carnal men.” And so, there are true and false theocratic forms. Therefore, the duty of true and faithful Christians is to use Scripture aright to rebut and rebuke an atheist world bent maliciously on discrediting ALL theocracy because of the malpractice of either false or excessive forms.

And finally, Aquinas brilliantly distinguishes between Godly and ungodly legislators, laws, and governments. He says: “If the lawmaker intends what is truly, AS GOD JUDGES IT, to the general good, the law will foster truly good men; but if he aims at his own profit and pleasure and opposes God’s justice then the law will foster not truly good men but only citizens of that state. Men good in that [latter] sense could actually be thoroughly wicked, as good robbers are.” Thus a “good comrade” in the Soviet Union was a very different soul from a free Christian citizen in Confederate South Carolina.

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Augustine tells us how his own view on the Scriptural propriety of coercing the lost for their own good changed over time. He was Bishop of Hippo, a town in North Africa, during the late Roman Empire, after Christianity had become the empire’s official religion. As an orthodox or Scripturally-true Christian, Augustine sat in councils and debated publicly with heretical sects of the time. These struggles and debates were the boiling cauldron or fiery crucible in which the great philosopher-theologian came to his mature views.

Earlier in life, Augustine believed that no one should be coerced into the unity of Christ, that we as Christians must act only by words, fight only by argument, and prevail by force of reason, in Socratic fashion, lest we should have those whom we know as avowed heretics feigning themselves to be Christians. In short, no one should be compelled to follow righteousness.

Over time, however, Augustine came to a different view, by closer study of Scripture, by the advice of wise elders, and by careful observation and reflection on the nature of himself and of others. In time, he came to see the coercion doctrine thoroughly confirmed in both testaments. In the New, for example ,in the parable of the great banquet, Jesus Himself speaks of the householder (Who is the Lord Himself) commanding his servants: “Whomsoever ye shall find, COMPEL them to come in”; and again, now in anger, “Go out quickly to the streets and lanes of the city, and BRING IN the poor and crippled and blind and lame”; and finally, “Go out to the highways and hedges and COMPEL PEOPLE TO COME IN, THAT MY HOUSE MAY BE FILLED”(Luke 14:12-24).

Augustine, as we saw previously, also cites, as proof of coercion doctrine, the conversion of the Apostle Paul from the Pharisee Saul. On the road to Damascus, Paul was compelled by great violence with which Christ coerced him to know and to embrace the Truth. He was literally and physically cast down to the ground, then blinded, and there was no recovery of sight until he became a member of the Church. Thus was a chief persecutor and murderer of Christians delivered from the error and evil of a false religion (Judaism — which rejects Christ) and from its fatal consequences (Acts 9:1-19;22:6-16).

Augustine then cites the compulsion inherent to the process of conversion of ALL believers. God the Father uses coercion — drawing — in the process of salvation. Thus God the Son says : “No one can come to me except the Father DRAW him. And I will raise him up on the last day”(John 6: 44).

And in both testaments, of course, the Lord Jesus is the Good Shepherd (Psalm 23, Isaiah 40, John 10), Who combines power and tender compassion. And while the wicked soul-thief Satan sometimes scatters food before the flock to lead them astray, the Good Shepherd brings wandering sheep back to the flock by the rod and hook. For the hook on a shepherd’s staff, also known as a crook, is a curved end that shepherds use to catch, guide, and RESCUE sheep. The hook is a defining feature of the staff and is essential for the shepherd’s work of forcible saving and retrieving.

Scripture aptly describes the Christian elect as sheep and the reprobate as goats. And certainly, the moral and intellectual distance between infinite God and finite man is, of course, far greater than that between a literal (finite human) shepherd and an ordinary sheep. Still, an ordinary sheep is a lowly creature indeed, an easy prey due to its slight mental and physical powers, and, helpless and doomed without the shepherd’s continuous salutary coercive protection.

Augustine also cites the story of Nebuchadnezzar eating grass (Daniel 4:33) as an instance of Godly coercion. Compelled or driven to eat grass for seven years, by a temporary madness inflicted by God as punishment for the great king’s pride and arrogance, the story illustrates a significant transformation for the better in Nebuchadnezzar’s character and serves as a lesson about humility.

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Having cited Biblical instances of Godly coercion of the lost and straying, Augustine dives down to the heart of the matter.

Coercion, or the use of physical force, can be used for good or for ill — by private individuals (such as fathers), and by legislators in framing and by governors in executing laws. What matters, says Augustine, is the heart and the intention and the intelligence of the coercer: thus, “he whose aim is to KILL is not careful how he wounds, but he whose aim is to CURE is cautious with his lancet; for the one seeks to destroy what is sound, the other that which is decaying.”

Jezebel slew true prophets of the Lord; Elijah slew false prophets (1Kings 17:4, 40) . The Jews physically scourged Christ; and Christ verbally and publicly scourged the Jews. The apostles were given over by men to civil powers; the apostles gave some men up to Satan. “In all these cases, what is important to attend to [is] this: who were on the side of truth, and who on the side of iniquity; who acted from a desire to injure, and who from a desire to correct what was amiss.”

As for the Christian being coerced by earthly authorities,the Lord did not say: “Blessed are the persecuted.” He said: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt. 5, 10). And certainly, the Church suffers persecution through the pride and impiety of those carnal men — and by those carnal men — whom it endeavors to correct.

The Church, in this earthly life, is a physical and spiritual nexus or lightning rod between Holy God and carnal and rebellious men that suffers persecution because of its supernatural authority, its earthly governing power, and its inextinguishable moral influence.

And because, as Socrates taught Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic, BEING RIGHT confers the right to rule, or to hold and to exercise the might of that great controlling power that is government, the Church is ever dreaded and ever feared by a lost and sinful world, whose master is Satan, that shuns correction. In this way, God’s invisible Church is a subversive and revolutionary entity, operating in all nations and in all ages, in behalf of HIs Truth and His Justice and His Mercy. In this way, Christians are duty-bound to wage unending civil war with their demonic-atheist neighbors in a struggle to gain and to keep the powers and emoluments of civil government and to use them to suppress evil and to promote the good.

The Christian in power, however imperfect due to his finitude and flesh, is a fundamentally different ruler from an unbeliever in power. The two differ in their modus operandi, or in their ways of seeing and doing. The unbeliever, being fundamentally carnal and spiritually lost, characteristically harbors in his heart a hatred that seeks to harm. In contrast, the Christian characteristically harbors in his heart a love that seeks to heal.

Whereas the Christian philosopher, for example, does better than his unbelieving counterpart at asking the right questions, and at avoiding wrong conclusions, the Christian ruler, compared to the unbelieving ruler, does better at setting right priorities and at avoiding wrong actions and policies. The Christian ruler too, by his better grasp or understanding of sin nature, is more mindful of Acton’s maxim that power tends to corrupt.

A closer look at the fundamental structure and operation of the unbeliever’s soul, as compared with the believer’s, reveals the following, as neatly and wonderfully summarized, with proof texts, in the Larger Catechism of the Westminster Standards.

The punishments for sin suffered by unbelievers in this world are blindness of mind, a reprobate sense, strong delusions, hardness of heart, horror of conscience, and vile affections. The punishments of sin in the world to come, are everlasting separation from the comfortable presence of God, and most grievous torments in soul and body, without intermission or interruption, in hellfire forever.

While Christian believers enjoy, in this life, the sense of God’s love, peace of conscience, joy in the Holy Ghost, and hope of glory; the wicked are beset by a sense of God’s revenging wrath, horror of conscience, a fearful expectation of Judgment, and a beginning of the torments they shall endure after death.

And so, hatred that seeks to harm, and love that seeks to heal. These are the widely disparate motives and uses of physical coercion in this world. In terms of logical possibilities or options, one can coerce righteously or unrighteously; and one can be coerced righteously or unrighteously. The duty and noble goal of the Christian is both to coerce righteously and to be coerced righteously.

Again, Augustine: “the things to be considered when any one is coerced, is not the mere fact of the coercion, but the nature of that to or rather toward which he is coerced, whether it be good or bad; not that anyone can be good in spite of his own will, but that, through fear of suffering what he does not desire, he either renounces his hostile prejudices, or is compelled to examine truth of which he had been contentedly ignorant; and under the influence of this fear [he] repudiates the error which he was wont to defend, or seeks that truth of which he formerly knew nothing, and now willingly holds what he formerly rejected.”

So the aim of Christian government and Christian law is to coerce toward good and away from evil.
And this involves, at root, compelling folk to examine the truth. And this means then that there is a salutary or healthy form of terror: for the “terror inspired by these [Godly] laws [can work effectually as] a kind of [medicine] for the cold and wicked hearts of many men, and [soften] that hardness of heart that cannot be softened by words.”

Hence, “It is not their death, but their deliverance from error that we seek to accomplish by the help of the terror of judges and of law.” So the lost may needs be instructed by anxiety, since too much security has made them careless of the truth or of their own souls and of the souls of others, including those they foolishly and dishonestly and corruptly claim to love. And so, there are hard hearts with rebellious minds that cannot be softened by words and persuasion that may however be reached and softened by coercion.

And while “it is indeed better (as no one indeed could deny) that men should be led to worship by teaching, than that they should be driven to it by fear of punishment or pain; it does not follow that because the former course [as a rule] produces the better men, therefore those who do not yield to it should be neglected, for many have found advantage (as we have proved, and are actually proving), in being first compelled by fear or pain, so that they may afterward be influenced by teaching or might follow out in act what they had already learned in word.”

And this brings us back to the Holy Spirit, speaking through Paul (2 Cor. 10: 3-6), about the deep nature of spiritual warfare: “For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish [and avenge] every disobedience, when your obedience is complete.”

And this, in turn, brings us to sober consideration of the reprobate in human societies and governments — and in our local churches. They are our neighbors whose hearts are continuously hardened by every truth they encounter during their earthly spans. They are the ones, in our very families, who are alien and hostile to us, as Christians, because they were, from the first, alien and hostile to Him. And since we believers, with our finite minds and imperfect hearts, can never with final authority and certainty declare another a reprobate — whatever may be our suspicions based on knowing others by their fruit (Matthew 7:16) — we must, in all doubtful cases, continue to lovingly pray for their souls, to the last second of their lives, since the Lord may have predetermined, as Leibniz reminds us, that the troubled one would be snatched away from the fire at the last possible moment.

In the meantime, Christian citizens and the Christian ruler and legislator have to reckon, in earthly polities, with the reprobate and with the elect who are as yet unregenerate, in all their antics and delusions and anti-Christ schemes. And the Christian ruler must always keep in mind the presence and activities of reprobate citizens, who are ever-hardened both by the truth and against the truth, and who are totally insusceptible to softening and conversion, either by words alone or by force and then words. He must remember how the reprobate in our midst are avowed children of Satan and therefore implacable enemies of better society and better government.

The standard of the Christian ruler is found in a Pauline letter to the church in Corinth. It refers ultimately both to governance within and to governance without the local and invisible churches. The Holy Spirit, through the Apostle, speaks of “being ready to punish every disobedience, when your [own] obedience is complete”(2 Corinthian 10:6). But of course Christ alone, the only perfect man, who is also God, is the only one who could ever be fit to punish EVERY disobedience of man.

But the human-all-too-human Christian ruler, supported by Christian citizenry, is called to be in spiritual preparation to punish in the polity every disobedience by sinful men against the Lord. He is called, by the Divine command in this verse, to perfect himself as he perfects the polity — to continuously examine himself in a spiritual mirror and to strive for improvement by the perfect standard of Christ. And this preparation for readiness to punish every disobedience prefigures or looks forward, in turn, to the elect being honored on the Judgment with a subordinate role in judging the reprobate. (1 Corinthians 6:3; Luke 22:30; Daniel 7:22; Revelation 3:21)

But before there can be Christian rulers there must be Christian revolutionaries and reformers whose aim is either to replace an existing government or to methodize and correct or reform an existing government by the standard of Christ. And political and social revolution and reform begin with the Christian family (Joshua 24:15), serving as salt and light (Matthew 5:13-16). And just as the firm establishment and maintenance of His Church in this world has hinged upon the grace He has dispensed and continues to dispense, the very existence and effectiveness of Godly coercion of the lost by Christian government and law depends, too, on His grace.

To all people, the Holy Spirit says that government is ordained to be “God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, BE AFRAID, for [the earthly ruler] does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer” (Romans 13:4). Still, in the interest of healing and not injuring, the Christian ruler exercises a characteristic moderation in punishing. In this way, says Augustine, violent and sometimes murderous members of the heretical Donatist sect of his day received, as legal sentencing from Christian rulers, fines and some imprisonment but not retaliatory maiming or killing.

And the Christian ruler exercises this virtue of moderation, from the Greek “sophrosyne”, both inside and outside his polity. His moderation tends to civilize warfare; and a noble chivalry is its flower. He hopes and aims for peace with ALL foreign nations, without prejudice; and by his moderate and humane example, he witnesses to a dark and bloody and vengeful world.

This characteristic and quintessential moderation of the Christian ruler was, of course, immortalized in Shakespeare’s Henry V: for “When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.”

More recently, Christian moderation was reflected in General Robert E. Lee’s stubborn Christian refusal to de-humanize by name-calling his wrong-headed and powerful and often wicked invading opponents. Despite the many depredations and outrages visited upon the civilian population of the South by the Yankee invaders, Lee prayed earnestly and steadfastly throughout the war for friend and foe alike; and, when referring to the army opposing him, Lee spoke, with Christian humanity and restraint, merely of “those people over there.”

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So now, dear reader, think back on your life of sin as I think back on mine.

The terrible absence in this world of Christian love, both of God and of neighbor, is the principal cause of the exponential growth and predominance of sin and evil. Had I personally been raised in a more Christian family and general society, I would have so much less to answer for at the Judgment.

If then I am to be compelled by parental and civil government, then let the compulsion be for my good and for the good of others. If I am to be governed, and I must be governed, let me be governed well.

As parents, we should love our children enough to coerce them for their own good. Spare the rod and spoil the child, indeed. And now we have seen, from Scripture, and with the help of Augustine and others, that the same is true of our adult neighbors. As Christians, we must love our neighbors enough to coerce them and to thereby over-ride their own wills for their own good as-needed and for the good of society as a whole. In this way, Christians should be to the lost what parents are or should be to their children.

Had I been loved more, and more intelligently and more truly, I would have sinned less myself, sinned less against others, and thereby caused them to sin less. And God forbid that I be misgoverned such that I am coerced toward evil and away from good. As a child or as one lost spiritually, let me be governed well. As a parent or Christian governor, let me govern well, as by the Lord’s law.

And let us remember that lost and evil men always view good government as tyrannical, since it curbs by punishment their pursuit and fulfilment of their lust.

But oh, what a dark and unloving world we live in now in 2025 — a world where supposed Christians hold up signs outside abortion clinics that read, so lamely: “Here to talk, but only if you want.” So ours is a distracted and corrupt “modern and progressive” world where ease has made the lost and unbelieving, as Augustine says, ” too listless, or conceited, or sluggish, to take pains to consider Christian truth.”

And at the Judgment, when it’s too late, some lost sinners will cry out, perhaps, in Augustinian remorse: “‘we knew not that the truth was here, and we had no wish to learn it. . .’ Alas, if only healthy fear of government and law that was Christian ‘had made us become earnest to examine [the Truth] when we became thus [fearful].’ For though, by following the better course, we would have been ‘smitten with loss in things temporal’, we would have gained ‘in things eternal.'”

Finally: Hell is now filled with those who, in this life, denied hell’s reality. So let us love enough now, on this side of Judgment, to coerce the lost for the good of all; and let us do it, most of all, to His glory.

Winston McCuen, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Furman University, holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Emory University and is a John C. Calhoun scholar. A native of Greenville County, South Carolina, he is the son of Dr. William Garrison McCuen and Anne Ballenger King McCuen.

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Winston McCuen says:

June 25, 2025 at 6:07 pm

CHRISTIAN GOVERNMENT, CHRISTIAN LAW, AND GODLY COERCION TO SAVE THE LOST

God created society to preserve and improve the human race. God created government and law to preserve and improve society. Every person assumes as true some favored concept of or belief about what is good and what is evil, and what is just and unjust; and every society and its government are based on some such prevalent conception or belief.

Because of man’s fallen and sinful nature, and his finitude and fallibility of mind, all human governments in this earthly life lie somewhere — far away from the perfect — on the spectrum of Godliness to ungodliness, of truth to error, and of good to evil.

In this best possible created world, God so ordered things that, as John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) taught in his Disquisition on Government, society and government flow naturally and inevitably out of the constitution or nature of man. This explains why anarchy and personal isolation from society are unnatural and unsustainable, being fundamentally contrary to human survival and flourishing. Moreover, having foreseen the Fall, God ordered things so that much of the resultant sin and vice, by a mysterious and invisible-hand process, or by what Hegel (1770-1831) called “the cunning of reason” in history, this sin and vice would be transformed into salutary institutions and laws.

Giambattista “John-the-Baptist” Vico (1688-1744), the great Christian philosopher of history, in his New Science, taught that fallen and unregenerate man embodies three great vices — ferocity, avarice, and ambition — that, if left unchecked, would destroy all mankind on the face of the earth. But God, in His deep and wise ordering of things for the good of His elect, the invisible Church, made it so that the legislation by men that wisely considers man as he actually is creates civil happiness by mysteriously and miraculously generating from these three vices, respectively, the military, merchant, and governing classes, and thereby the strength, riches, and wisdom of commonwealths.

According to Vico, proof that there is divine providence and a divine legislative mind is exhibited in how, out of the sinful passions of men each bent on his private advantage, for the sake of which they would live like wild beasts in the wilderness, God’s providence has made the civil institutions by which they may live in human society.

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So the ultimate purpose of government in this earthly life, as compared with government after Judgment in the state of eternity — is to restrain the wicked for the sake of God’s elect, the body of Christian believers past, present, and future. When operating as it should during this earthly life, government shields the innocent as they are being tested during their earthly pilgrimage in the midst of the ravenous unbelieving wicked. This is why Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), in his Leviathan, called his hypothetical state of nature, where no government and civil society exist, a condition where each man wars continuously against every other, and where human life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

So while believers, by HIs grace, in their fundamental spiritual essence, are governed FROM WITHIN by His Law implanted in their hearts; unbelievers, in their essence, are lawless and must therefore be restrained FROM WITHOUT by external government. But after the Judgment, by God’s righteous separation and segregation of the elect and the reprobate into two unconnectable realms, no need of such restraint will exist.

So the salutary institutions, including laws and government, referenced by Vico, use compulsion or coercion to in some degree mitigate and moderate sinful passion in the reprobate and in fleshly believers, for the sake of public order and personal protection (including property). In this way, sinful man’s fear of punishment by that great controlling power that is government — a blessed proxy from God — makes civil society possible. Without such salutary compulsion or coercion, the human race would, in short order, perish by the violence and exposure resulting from that chronic, acute, inevitable, and terminal disorder endemic to anarchy.

But government, as Calhoun taught, is about more than securing merely the survival of the human race. It is also about improving the race — materially, intellectually, and morally, to His Glory. To achieve such improvement, measured and prudentially-implemented Godly coercion by human government is needed. And this is why, contrary to the counter-Scriptural claims of apolitical quietists and pacifists, the Lord has his elect children pray, “on earth as in heaven.” And so earthly government and law is to become more Christian, and such better law and government is to play a key role in glorifying HIs name and growing His church.

In this vein, the great theologian Bonaventure (c.1217-1274) aptly called the Christian’s becoming more Christ-like “exemplarism”; and he called the Christian departing this troubled world to be with his Lord in heaven “consummation.”

And while here on earth, the Christian is commanded to be salt and light in witnessing to His Truth and Goodness, to be a Godly leaven in society and government, and even, to avenge in somewise disobedience to the Lord (2 Corinthians 10:6), while not avenging harm to himself (Romans 12:19).

So, by these commands, He avenges for us, and we Christians, in somewise, are to avenge for Him: and thereby He teaches us selflessness and solicitude for others. For in our finitude we are eminently vulnerable to injury, physical and especially spiritual; but God, in His infinite perfections, is untouchable. And while His kingdom is not of this world, since it encompasses all creation, each Christian, during his appointed earthly span, is commanded and obliged to witness fully to the Lord in ALL facets and arenas of earthly life, and to willingly and freely suffer persecution for Truth’s sake, to His glory, by which and in which man, paradoxically, derives his highest joy.

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“What you believe is what you are” — is a very sobering truth; especially if one is fundamentally in error.
And of course, those who take being in truth or in error lightly are typically those fatally oblivious to this truth, up until Judgment.

And beliefs, as expressed in words, actions, and living in general, have, by their moral influence, impact on and consequences for self and for others That said: Should adults be held accountable for and even punished for holding erroneous views on fundamental moral-existential subjects, by human authorities and prior to the final, Divine Judgment? In answer to this question, the carnally-minded “live and let live” libertarian world says, of course, “No!” But never mind that, because the All-Wise and All-Good God — the Creator and Judge of libertarians — says, emphatically, “Yes!”, because, from those to whom more has been given by Him, more is expected (Luke 12:48). Or as the great Southern writer Richard Weaver (1910-1963) put it: ideas have consequences. And coercion, for good or for ill, is a principal cause of the ideas we hold to be true and false.

The use of coercion — both physical and mental — to promote good and to suppress evil is a central theme of the Bible, God’s written Word, in both testaments.

The Apostle Paul, before his conversion, was a notorious Christian-killer and persecuting Pharisee. On the road to Damascus, the Lord Jesus Christ, God in the Person of the Son, used bodily coercion on Saul — blinding him and knocking him to the ground — as preparation for His turning his will away from self and toward the one and only true (Triune) God. Citing Paul’s conversion as an instance of salutary coercion, Augustine of Hippo (354-430) observes: “It is wonderful how he who entered the service of the gospel in the first instance under the compulsion of bodily punishment, afterwards labored more in the gospel than all they who were called by word only.”

This raises the question of the voluntariness, or involuntariness, of Christian conversion in general. The fallen man, in the state of sin and misery into which he is born, cannot save himself. As a man dead in trespasses, self-salvation is not an option. So God, and God alone, does the saving of His elect. But does the second great commandment, to love one’s neighbor as one’s self, mean that Christians may and indeed should employ coercive means to move unbelieving neighbors away from evil and toward God the Good? Put another way: Are unbelievers to be rescued, even against their will; and how can that be, since the door of hell is locked from the inside; that is, it is fallen man’s rebellious and misdirected will that separates him from God and bars him from entry into heaven?

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The Bible clearly states, as we shall see below, that physical coercion, including the threat thereof, is permissible and indeed requisite to properly raising children. Parental coercion rightly done — with fairness, moderation, and due measure — is an indispensable part of true and virtuous parental loving. Thus, “Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him” (Prov. 13: 24). Indeed, the sparing of the rod is condemned by our All-good and All-knowing God as gross, unloving, and hateful negligence.

But of course, the world, and especially, our modern world, in its lost and evil tenderness toward and outright advocacy of carnal feeling, opposes both the corporal punishment of children and the physical coercion of adults away from evil and toward the good.

The way of the modern, libertarian, unbelieving world is to condemn all coercion, or coercion per se, regardless of the purported reason or end-object of the coercion. In this way, carnal and unbelieving minds generate and propound elaborate false philosophies to legitimate — not by sound reasoning but by corrupt rationalization — rebellion against God. The goal of socially liberal or “hippie” libertarianism, along with its ultimate end-state position, atheist communism, is to fend off true or Biblical moral criticism and correction of narrowly selfish or carnal life and living.

These lost and weak and effete libertarians define government as that institution in society with a monopoly on the use of coercive force within a given geographical territory. (And these libertarians themselves are divided among purist anarchists and compromising minimal-statists.) On the other hand, liberals today, as compared with libertarians, believe in using governmental coercion to proactively push evil and to suppress the good. Unlike the libertarian, the liberal embraces carnal government as his god — made in his own image — on earth. But these “no-government” and “government-for-evil” positions are wrong because both are contrary both to human nature and Divine intent.

Government has been best defined, by John C. Calhoun, as that CONTROLLING POWER, of whatever particular form — whether monarchical, aristocratical, or democratic, or some combination of these — which was ordained by God to protect and perfect society.

But our main concern here, in this essay, is not government in general, but rather, specifically Christian government — government that, by the letter and spirit of its laws, and by the moral trajectory and influence of its officers, is palpably, identifiably, and conspicuously infused with His written Word, and which vigorously and zealously aims, as a human-institutional manifestation of God’s grace, to save, edify, and safeguard the souls of citizens.

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The project of compelling, by human government, the lost toward good and away from evil, to be successful, must take into account, of course, the fallibility and susceptibility to corruption of both the legislator and the executive or enforcer. The British historian Lord Acton (1834-1902), paraphrasing from Calhoun’s South Carolina Exposition and Protest (1828), famously said, “Power corrupts, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.”

Also, the Christian legislator must effectively consider, or factor into his statesmanship equation, the limited moral and mental receptivity, and the tendency to recalcitrance, resistance, and outright rebellion, of the lost. This relation between the Christian ruler and the lost is itself a reflection writ small of the basic cosmic relation between infinite, perfect God and finite, sinful man. And the philosopher Leibniz (1646-1716), in his Christian work Theodicy, has done the most to explain the limited receptivity of finite man to God’s infinite goodness and greatness.

But, many centuries earlier, Aristotle (384-322 BC), as if in anticipation of the fuller Christian revelation, in his Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, said that the aim of legislation is the fostering of virtue, and that happiness is activity in accordance with virtue. And a virtue, like courage or moderation or wit, is a strength or power, a Golden Mean between vicious extremes, an acquired habit or disposition toward the good. Courage, for example, is a mean between cowardice and rashness; and wit is a mean between boorishness and buffoonery. And having defined man, by the logical method of genus and differentia, as a rational and political animal (“zoon politikon”), Aristotle observed how man, when perfectly virtuous, is the best of animals; but without law and justice he is the worse, since he, by his reason, can devise weapons to satisfy his lusts and savagery, which other animals cannot.

Later, Archbishop Isidore of Seville (c.560-636 AD), widely regarded as “the last scholar of the ancient world”, nicely summarized that “laws should be worthy, fair, possible of enforcement and of obedience according to nature and to the customs of the land, suited to the place and time, needed, useful, clear (so it can’t trap people in its obscurity), serving no private interest but framed for the general good of all citizens.”

But it was Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, who has come closest to understanding the great complexity of God’s providence as it relates to government and law. He shrewdly noted how human law can’t afford to punish or forbid ALL wrongdoing: it can only do so by also forbidding a great deal of good and hindering much that serves the general good of human social intercourse. So, we humans needed in addition a law of God that could leave no wrongdoing unforbidden and unpunished.

In the same vein, Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-1274), in his Summa Theologiae, said that civil laws necessarily let many things pass unfinished which God’s plan must put right. Laws must fit the human condition and be possible according to nature and the customs of the land. For the non-virtuous cannot do the same things as the virtuous, nor children the same as grown-ups. To be just, laws must serve the general good, must not exceed the lawmaker’s authority, and must fairly apportion the burdens of the general good amongst all members of the community.

Aquinas notes how in evil men both ways of being subject to eternal law are decayed as it were: the natural, God-created tendency to virtue spoilt by vice, and the natural knowledge of what is good darkened by passion and habitual wrongdoing. On the other hand, good men share the eternal law more perfectly in both ways: to their natural knowledge of what is good is added faith and wisdom, and to their natural tendency to do good is added the interior stimulus of grace and virtue.

Aquinas also noted that some wrongdoing is specially called UNNATURAL because it goes against even animal nature: homosexual acts, for example, which run counter to the natural mode of intercourse between male and female.

And man finds moral training hard work on his own. For those blessed by God with good natural temperaments and customs, parental training by admonition is enough; but those who are rebellious and prone to vice and unresponsive to words have to be kept from evil by force or fear, so that others at least are left in peace, and they themselves gradually start doing from choice what earlier they did from fear and so grow virtuous. And here we see Aquinas citing a positive, soul-shaping role for coercion.

Building on Augustine, Aquinas emphasizes that too extensive suppression of sin by government and law tends to trigger greater outbreaks of sinning. “Human law aims at human virtue, but step by step, not all at once; to insist on a degree of perfection that most people cannot manage would only cause them to break out in worse wrongdoing”, a subtle truth confirmed by historical experiments in Christian theocracy, including, for example, Calvin’s Geneva, Cromwell’s Republic, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

But fallen humanity ever-tends to fall even further. It ever-tends to collapse back on and to legitimate the devilishly carnal. Indeed, we see legitimation doctrines cooked up by figures as culturally and racially disparate as the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) and the Arab prophet Mohammed (c.570-632). Hume, an atheist-skeptic, in his History of England, goes too far in criticizing Puritan England and in celebrating the return to a Stuart king and the Church of England. In his hatred of true or Reformed Christianity, Hume the “moral philosopher” uncritically embraced the moral laxness and error endemic to traditional and highly-carnal common life.

And Aquinas himself, the great Christian theologian, saw right through the adolescent religious farce that is Islam. Aquinas wrote: “He (Mohammed) seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure to which the concupiscence of the flesh urges us. His teaching also contained precepts that were in conformity with his promises, and he gave free rein to carnal pleasure. In all this, as is not unexpected; he was obeyed by carnal men.” And so, there are true and false theocratic forms. Therefore, the duty of true and faithful Christians is to use Scripture aright to rebut and rebuke an atheist world bent maliciously on discrediting ALL theocracy because of the malpractice of either false or excessive forms.

And finally, Aquinas brilliantly distinguishes between Godly and ungodly legislators, laws, and governments. He says: “If the lawmaker intends what is truly, AS GOD JUDGES IT, to the general good, the law will foster truly good men; but if he aims at his own profit and pleasure and opposes God’s justice then the law will foster not truly good men but only citizens of that state. Men good in that [latter] sense could actually be thoroughly wicked, as good robbers are.” Thus a “good comrade” in the Soviet Union was a very different soul from a free Christian citizen in Confederate South Carolina.

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Augustine tells us how his own view on the Scriptural propriety of coercing the lost for their own good changed over time. He was Bishop of Hippo, a town in North Africa, during the late Roman Empire, after Christianity had become the empire’s official religion. As an orthodox or Scripturally-true Christian, Augustine sat in councils and debated publicly with heretical sects of the time. These struggles and debates were the boiling cauldron or fiery crucible in which the great philosopher-theologian came to his mature views.

Earlier in life, Augustine believed that no one should be coerced into the unity of Christ, that we as Christians must act only by words, fight only by argument, and prevail by force of reason, in Socratic fashion, lest we should have those whom we know as avowed heretics feigning themselves to be Christians. In short, no one should be compelled to follow righteousness.

Over time, however, Augustine came to a different view, by closer study of Scripture, by the advice of wise elders, and by careful observation and reflection on the nature of himself and of others. In time, he came to see the coercion doctrine thoroughly confirmed in both testaments. In the New, for example ,in the parable of the great banquet, Jesus Himself speaks of the householder (Who is the Lord Himself) commanding his servants: “Whomsoever ye shall find, COMPEL them to come in”; and again, now in anger, “Go out quickly to the streets and lanes of the city, and BRING IN the poor and crippled and blind and lame”; and finally, “Go out to the highways and hedges and COMPEL PEOPLE TO COME IN, THAT MY HOUSE MAY BE FILLED”(Luke 14:12-24).

Augustine, as we saw previously, also cites, as proof of coercion doctrine, the conversion of the Apostle Paul from the Pharisee Saul. On the road to Damascus, Paul was compelled by great violence with which Christ coerced him to know and to embrace the Truth. He was literally and physically cast down to the ground, then blinded, and there was no recovery of sight until he became a member of the Church. Thus was a chief persecutor and murderer of Christians delivered from the error and evil of a false religion (Judaism — which rejects Christ) and from its fatal consequences (Acts 9:1-19;22:6-16).

Augustine then cites the compulsion inherent to the process of conversion of ALL believers. God the Father uses coercion — drawing — in the process of salvation. Thus God the Son says : “No one can come to me except the Father DRAW him. And I will raise him up on the last day”(John 6: 44).

And in both testaments, of course, the Lord Jesus is the Good Shepherd (Psalm 23, Isaiah 40, John 10), Who combines power and tender compassion. And while the wicked soul-thief Satan sometimes scatters food before the flock to lead them astray, the Good Shepherd brings wandering sheep back to the flock by the rod and hook. For the hook on a shepherd’s staff, also known as a crook, is a curved end that shepherds use to catch, guide, and RESCUE sheep. The hook is a defining feature of the staff and is essential for the shepherd’s work of forcible saving and retrieving.

Scripture aptly describes the Christian elect as sheep and the reprobate as goats. And certainly, the moral and intellectual distance between infinite God and finite man is, of course, far greater than that between a literal (finite human) shepherd and an ordinary sheep. Still, an ordinary sheep is a lowly creature indeed, an easy prey due to its slight mental and physical powers, and, helpless and doomed without the shepherd’s continuous salutary coercive protection.

Augustine also cites the story of Nebuchadnezzar eating grass (Daniel 4:33) as an instance of Godly coercion. Compelled or driven to eat grass for seven years, by a temporary madness inflicted by God as punishment for the great king’s pride and arrogance, the story illustrates a significant transformation for the better in Nebuchadnezzar’s character and serves as a lesson about humility.

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Having cited Biblical instances of Godly coercion of the lost and straying, Augustine dives down to the heart of the matter.

Coercion, or the use of physical force, can be used for good or for ill — by private individuals (such as fathers), and by legislators in framing and by governors in executing laws. What matters, says Augustine, is the heart and the intention and the intelligence of the coercer: thus, “he whose aim is to KILL is not careful how he wounds, but he whose aim is to CURE is cautious with his lancet; for the one seeks to destroy what is sound, the other that which is decaying.”

Jezebel slew true prophets of the Lord; Elijah slew false prophets (1Kings 17:4, 40) . The Jews physically scourged Christ; and Christ verbally and publicly scourged the Jews. The apostles were given over by men to civil powers; the apostles gave some men up to Satan. “In all these cases, what is important to attend to [is] this: who were on the side of truth, and who on the side of iniquity; who acted from a desire to injure, and who from a desire to correct what was amiss.”

As for the Christian being coerced by earthly authorities,the Lord did not say: “Blessed are the persecuted.” He said: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt. 5, 10). And certainly, the Church suffers persecution through the pride and impiety of those carnal men — and by those carnal men — whom it endeavors to correct.

The Church, in this earthly life, is a physical and spiritual nexus or lightning rod between Holy God and carnal and rebellious men that suffers persecution because of its supernatural authority, its earthly governing power, and its inextinguishable moral influence.

And because, as Socrates taught Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic, BEING RIGHT confers the right to rule, or to hold and to exercise the might of that great controlling power that is government, the Church is ever dreaded and ever feared by a lost and sinful world, whose master is Satan, that shuns correction. In this way, God’s invisible Church is a subversive and revolutionary entity, operating in all nations and in all ages, in behalf of HIs Truth and His Justice and His Mercy. In this way, Christians are duty-bound to wage unending civil war with their demonic-atheist neighbors in a struggle to gain and to keep the powers and emoluments of civil government and to use them to suppress evil and to promote the good.

The Christian in power, however imperfect due to his finitude and flesh, is a fundamentally different ruler from an unbeliever in power. The two differ in their modus operandi, or in their ways of seeing and doing. The unbeliever, being fundamentally carnal and spiritually lost, characteristically harbors in his heart a hatred that seeks to harm. In contrast, the Christian characteristically harbors in his heart a love that seeks to heal.

Whereas the Christian philosopher, for example, does better than his unbelieving counterpart at asking the right questions, and at avoiding wrong conclusions, the Christian ruler, compared to the unbelieving ruler, does better at setting right priorities and at avoiding wrong actions and policies. The Christian ruler too, by his better grasp or understanding of sin nature, is more mindful of Acton’s maxim that power tends to corrupt.

A closer look at the fundamental structure and operation of the unbeliever’s soul, as compared with the believer’s, reveals the following, as neatly and wonderfully summarized, with proof texts, in the Larger Catechism of the Westminster Standards.

The punishments for sin suffered by unbelievers in this world are blindness of mind, a reprobate sense, strong delusions, hardness of heart, horror of conscience, and vile affections. The punishments of sin in the world to come, are everlasting separation from the comfortable presence of God, and most grievous torments in soul and body, without intermission or interruption, in hellfire forever.

While Christian believers enjoy, in this life, the sense of God’s love, peace of conscience, joy in the Holy Ghost, and hope of glory; the wicked are beset by a sense of God’s revenging wrath, horror of conscience, a fearful expectation of Judgment, and a beginning of the torments they shall endure after death.

And so, hatred that seeks to harm, and love that seeks to heal. These are the widely disparate motives and uses of physical coercion in this world. In terms of logical possibilities or options, one can coerce righteously or unrighteously; and one can be coerced righteously or unrighteously. The duty and noble goal of the Christian is both to coerce righteously and to be coerced righteously.

Again, Augustine: “the things to be considered when any one is coerced, is not the mere fact of the coercion, but the nature of that to or rather toward which he is coerced, whether it be good or bad; not that anyone can be good in spite of his own will, but that, through fear of suffering what he does not desire, he either renounces his hostile prejudices, or is compelled to examine truth of which he had been contentedly ignorant; and under the influence of this fear [he] repudiates the error which he was wont to defend, or seeks that truth of which he formerly knew nothing, and now willingly holds what he formerly rejected.”

So the aim of Christian government and Christian law is to coerce toward good and away from evil.
And this involves, at root, compelling folk to examine the truth. And this means then that there is a salutary or healthy form of terror: for the “terror inspired by these [Godly] laws [can work effectually as] a kind of [medicine] for the cold and wicked hearts of many men, and [soften] that hardness of heart that cannot be softened by words.”

Hence, “It is not their death, but their deliverance from error that we seek to accomplish by the help of the terror of judges and of law.” So the lost may needs be instructed by anxiety, since too much security has made them careless of the truth or of their own souls and of the souls of others, including those they foolishly and dishonestly and corruptly claim to love. And so, there are hard hearts with rebellious minds that cannot be softened by words and persuasion that may however be reached and softened by coercion.

And while “it is indeed better (as no one indeed could deny) that men should be led to worship by teaching, than that they should be driven to it by fear of punishment or pain; it does not follow that because the former course [as a rule] produces the better men, therefore those who do not yield to it should be neglected, for many have found advantage (as we have proved, and are actually proving), in being first compelled by fear or pain, so that they may afterward be influenced by teaching or might follow out in act what they had already learned in word.”

And this brings us back to the Holy Spirit, speaking through Paul (2 Cor. 10: 3-6), about the deep nature of spiritual warfare: “For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish [and avenge] every disobedience, when your obedience is complete.”

And this, in turn, brings us to sober consideration of the reprobate in human societies and governments — and in our local churches. They are our neighbors whose hearts are continuously hardened by every truth they encounter during their earthly spans. They are the ones, in our very families, who are alien and hostile to us, as Christians, because they were, from the first, alien and hostile to Him. And since we believers, with our finite minds and imperfect hearts, can never with final authority and certainty declare another a reprobate — whatever may be our suspicions based on knowing others by their fruit (Matthew 7:16) — we must, in all doubtful cases, continue to lovingly pray for their souls, to the last second of their lives, since the Lord may have predetermined, as Leibniz reminds us, that the troubled one would be snatched away from the fire at the last possible moment.

In the meantime, Christian citizens and the Christian ruler and legislator have to reckon, in earthly polities, with the reprobate and with the elect who are as yet unregenerate, in all their antics and delusions and anti-Christ schemes. And the Christian ruler must always keep in mind the presence and activities of reprobate citizens, who are ever-hardened both by the truth and against the truth, and who are totally insusceptible to softening and conversion, either by words alone or by force and then words. He must remember how the reprobate in our midst are avowed children of Satan and therefore implacable enemies of better society and better government.

The standard of the Christian ruler is found in a Pauline letter to the church in Corinth. It refers ultimately both to governance within and to governance without the local and invisible churches. The Holy Spirit, through the Apostle, speaks of “being ready to punish every disobedience, when your [own] obedience is complete”(2 Corinthian 10:6). But of course Christ alone, the only perfect man, who is also God, is the only one who could ever be fit to punish EVERY disobedience of man.

But the human-all-too-human Christian ruler, supported by Christian citizenry, is called to be in spiritual preparation to punish in the polity every disobedience by sinful men against the Lord. He is called, by the Divine command in this verse, to perfect himself as he perfects the polity — to continuously examine himself in a spiritual mirror and to strive for improvement by the perfect standard of Christ. And this preparation for readiness to punish every disobedience prefigures or looks forward, in turn, to the elect being honored on the Judgment with a subordinate role in judging the reprobate. (1 Corinthians 6:3; Luke 22:30; Daniel 7:22; Revelation 3:21)

But before there can be Christian rulers there must be Christian revolutionaries and reformers whose aim is either to replace an existing government or to methodize and correct or reform an existing government by the standard of Christ. And political and social revolution and reform begin with the Christian family (Joshua 24:15), serving as salt and light (Matthew 5:13-16). And just as the firm establishment and maintenance of His Church in this world has hinged upon the grace He has dispensed and continues to dispense, the very existence and effectiveness of Godly coercion of the lost by Christian government and law depends, too, on His grace.

To all people, the Holy Spirit says that government is ordained to be “God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, BE AFRAID, for [the earthly ruler] does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer” (Romans 13:4). Still, in the interest of healing and not injuring, the Christian ruler exercises a characteristic moderation in punishing. In this way, says Augustine, violent and sometimes murderous members of the heretical Donatist sect of his day received, as legal sentencing from Christian rulers, fines and some imprisonment but not retaliatory maiming or killing.

And the Christian ruler exercises this virtue of moderation, from the Greek “sophrosyne”, both inside and outside his polity. His moderation tends to civilize warfare; and a noble chivalry is its flower. He hopes and aims for peace with ALL foreign nations, without prejudice; and by his moderate and humane example, he witnesses to a dark and bloody and vengeful world.

This characteristic and quintessential moderation of the Christian ruler was, of course, immortalized in Shakespeare’s Henry V: for “When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.”

More recently, Christian moderation was reflected in General Robert E. Lee’s stubborn Christian refusal to de-humanize by name-calling his wrong-headed and powerful and often wicked invading opponents. Despite the many depredations and outrages visited upon the civilian population of the South by the Yankee invaders, Lee prayed earnestly and steadfastly throughout the war for friend and foe alike; and, when referring to the army opposing him, Lee spoke, with Christian humanity and restraint, merely of “those people over there.”

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So now, dear reader, think back on your life of sin as I think back on mine.

The terrible absence in this world of Christian love, both of God and of neighbor, is the principal cause of the exponential growth and predominance of sin and evil. Had I personally been raised in a more Christian family and general society, I would have so much less to answer for at the Judgment.

If then I am to be compelled by parental and civil government, then let the compulsion be for my good and for the good of others. If I am to be governed, and I must be governed, let me be governed well.

As parents, we should love our children enough to coerce them for their own good. Spare the rod and spoil the child, indeed. And now we have seen, from Scripture, and with the help of Augustine and others, that the same is true of our adult neighbors. As Christians, we must love our neighbors enough to coerce them and to thereby over-ride their own wills for their own good as-needed and for the good of society as a whole. In this way, Christians should be to the lost what parents are or should be to their children.

Had I been loved more, and more intelligently and more truly, I would have sinned less myself, sinned less against others, and thereby caused them to sin less. And God forbid that I be misgoverned such that I am coerced toward evil and away from good. As a child or as one lost spiritually, let me be governed well. As a parent or Christian governor, let me govern well, as by the Lord’s law.

And let us remember that lost and evil men always view good government as tyrannical, since it curbs by punishment their pursuit and fulfilment of their lust.

But oh, what a dark and unloving world we live in now in 2025 — a world where supposed Christians hold up signs outside abortion clinics that read, so lamely: “Here to talk, but only if you want.” So ours is a distracted and corrupt “modern and progressive” world where ease has made the lost and unbelieving, as Augustine says, ” too listless, or conceited, or sluggish, to take pains to consider Christian truth.”

And at the Judgment, when it’s too late, some lost sinners will cry out, perhaps, in Augustinian remorse: “‘we knew not that the truth was here, and we had no wish to learn it. . .’ Alas, if only healthy fear of government and law that was Christian ‘had made us become earnest to examine [the Truth] when we became thus [fearful].’ For though, by following the better course, we would have been ‘smitten with loss in things temporal’, we would have gained ‘in things eternal.'”

Finally: Hell is now filled with those who, in this life, denied hell’s reality. So let us love enough now, on this side of Judgment, to coerce the lost for the good of all; and let us do it, most of all, to His glory.

Winston McCuen, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Furman University, holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Emory University and is a John C. Calhoun scholar. A native of Greenville County, South Carolina, he is the son of Dr. William Garrison McCuen and Anne Ballenger King McCuen.

The Word Is Getting Out

Author: jetbrane

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