All Other Authorities are Therefore Derived, Limited, and Subordinate
It is our contention that true, abiding liberty can only be achieved and once achieved, sustained, within the Christian world-view. All other frameworks or ideologies draw upon the creature, not the Creator. Being of the creation, other ideologies end up oppressing and enslaving some, if not many. Struggles for freedom in non-Christian states devolve into conflicts between elites striving to impose their respective truths upon the population at large.
Each non-Christian elite ends up defining some minority or other as outlaws--beyond the law--and persecutes them accordingly. In today's "free societies", for example, the unborn child has been defined as the outlaw. He has become an involuntary sacrifice to the glory of the secularist realm. But there are other candidates for sacrifice and the longer secularism holds sway, the more citizens who have a different view and who march to the beat of a different Drummer, will be designated outlaws. Remember that the communist tyranny of the Soviet Union regarded itself as the most free realm on the earth.
The Christian Church has seen and experienced this before.
It has had to make the Christian case for liberty, for maximum freedom under law. How has it done this? And why is it so that only the Christian world-view can achieve and maintain a state of maximal liberty for all? Part of the answer is found in an extended essay, entitled Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, written under the nom de plume, Junius Brutus in France in the seventeenth century. The author(s) set the argument up by restating the structures of authority in the world. Herein lies the foundation for maximum freedom under law.
First, the Holy Scripture doth teach, that God reigns by his own proper authority, and kings [or ruling authorities, Ed.] by derivation, God from himself, kings from God, that God hath a jurisdiction proper, kings are his delegates. It follows then, that the jurisdiction of God hath no limits, that of kings bounded; that the power of God is infinite, that of kings confined; that the kingdom of God extends itself to all places, that of kings is restrained within the confines of certain countries.
In like manner God hath created of nothing both heaven and earth; wherefore by good right He is lord, and true proprietor, both of the one and the other. All the inhabitants of the earth hold of Him that which they have, and are but His tenants and farmers; all the princes and governors of the world are His stipendiaries and vassals, and are bound to take and acknowledge their investitures from Him.
Briefly, God alone is the owner and lord, and all men of what degree or quality soever they be, are His servants, farmers, officers and vassals, and owe account and acknowledgement to Him, according to that which He hath committed to their dispensation. The higher their place is the greater their account must be, and according to the ranks whereunto God hath raised them, must they make their reckoning before His divine majesty, which the Holy Scriptures teacheth in infinite places, and all the faithful, yea, the wisest among the heathen have ever acknowledged.
The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof (so saith King David). And to the end that men should not sacrifice their own industry the earth yields no increase with out the dew of heaven. Wherefore God commanded that His people should offer unto Him the first of their fruits, and the heathens themselves hath consecrated the same unto their gods; to the end, that God might be acknowledged lord, and they his grangers and vine dressers, the heaven is the throne of the Lord, and the earth His footstool. [Junius Brutus, A Defence of Liberty Against Tyrants. A translation of the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos. With an historical introduction by Harold J. Laski. (Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1963), p.67f.]
The author goes on to point out that these things hold true throughout the universe at all time and that whilst they are plainly revealed amongst the people of God throughout redemptive history, those same plain revelations are applied to pagan kings and their peoples. When and where these truths are known and confessed that the fields are ripe unto a rich harvest of liberty amongst a people.
The contrary is also true. Where God and His Christ are denied, men seek original--and therefore, total-- authority in themselves and their own speculations. Possessing power itself becomes divinised and liberty withers away. One generation says that human beings have an inalienable right to life; it is followed by a generation which says that an unborn child is not a human being at all and "it" can, therefore, be cut up alive, and murdered at will.
Without acknowledging God as the infinite, eternal, and unchangeable Power, to which all human authority is, and must be, subject, the centre of human liberty cannot hold. But the question remains begged: when the tyrant arises, how can liberty be defended? We will turn to this pressing issue in subsequent posts.
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