Using God-Given Authority Properly and Appropriately

Romans 13 and the COVID-19 Virus

Douglas Wilson
Blog & Mablog

Introduction

As the numerous state lock downs continue, and various Christian organizations have to make decisions about what to do about it, churches particularly, this brings into high relief all the various assumptions that Christians have been carrying about concerning Romans 13. Huh, we think. Look at that.

What I would like for this post to do is to provide something of a primer on sphere sovereignty? How are the governments God created to relate to one another in a time such as this? . . .


The Romans 13 Problem

As our session of elders has been working this out, one of our men helpfully outlined the three positions that Christians tend to take on the magistrate’s authority to shut down a church in an emergency situation.

The first is that the civil magistrate has no authority over whether a church holds worship services. They may advise, but not command. The church is like a house cat. Unlike a dog, it never obeys you; it sometimes agrees with you.

The second position is that the magistrate has genuine authority in times of emergency to command the church to do certain things, or refrain from certain things (as with a quarantine in a time of plague). When the church complies, it is obedience, not happenstance agreement. At the same time, because no human authority is absolute, and because every form of human authority can be corrupted, those under authority, including the church (and especially the church), have the authority to identify when the genuine authority of the magistrate is being abused or mishandled to the point where it is now legitimate to disregard what they are saying.

The third position is to take a surface reading of Romans 13 (obey the existing authorities) as a straightforward absolute. Whatever they say, we are supposed to do.

To help you keep track of things, I am arguing for the second position here. I am doing this because, among other things, it is the correct position.

Three Governments

There are three basic governments that have their existence directly from the hand of God.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Wife Beating and the Idea of Revelation

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

Revelation presupposes three things — a revealer, a recipient, and a message with an accompanying hermeneutic. There is one who speaks, there are the ones spoken to, and there is the message along with the medium that carries that message. That medium would include all the created world, with its atmosphere and sound waves, papyrus, paper, computer screens, ink, toner, ones and zeros, and . . . a hermeneutic. How many times did Jesus tell us that the one with ears should hear?

It is important to get the hermeneutic right. To illustrate how important this hermeneutic is (illustrated by two different versions of it, two distinct theologies of revelation) let us compare two very angular texts with regard to women. The first is from the Koran and the second from Exodus.

[Husbands] “are the protectors and maintainers of their [wives] because Allah has given the one more [strength] than the other, and because they support them from their means. Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient and guard in [the husband’s] absence what Allah would have them guard. As to the women on whose part you fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them first, refuse to share their beds, spank them, if they return to obedience, seek not against them means of [annoyance]: for Allah is Most High, Great” (Surah 4:34).

“And if a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the menservants do. If she please not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her be redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation he shall have no power, seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her” (Ex. 21:7–8).

The passage from the Koran instructs a husband on the process required in pious wife-beating. Begin with admonition, and then move on to a refusal to have sex with her. If that doesn’t work, then corporal punishment may be applied. And the modern world says eeeek, recoiling, and rightly so.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

11 Theses on the Meaning of Scriptural Authority

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

Monday, January 26, 2015

1. Our starting point for all discussions of biblical authority should begin with an affirmation of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. More needs to said on this subject than was said there, but not less. Fruitful discussion can take place only among those who can honestly sign that statement. With those who cannot sign it, our duty is that of charitable debate and refutation.

2. Obedience is a key element in exegetical understanding. Obedience is the opener of eyes. Without obedient application, the text is not really being studied.

3. Affirmations of biblical authority are worthless unless we understand that the contemporary secular challenges to biblical authority create enormous pressure on those affirming inerrancy to develop interpretive workarounds, such that inerrancy can be formally affirmed while being practically denied. Examples of such pressures today would include biblical teaching on sexuality and human origins.

4. Scripture is given to us as seed, and is therefore intended to grow and flower down through history. The Word of God is living and active and this extends to more than just the personal conversion of individuals. The living Word is intended by its growth to shape and govern all of human history. The development of unbelief in history has no authority to dictate the contents of the seed.

Binding in the Darkness

Command and Control Versus a Mutual Submission in Love

Islam is a command and control philosophy/religion.  Consequently, it is marked by authoritarian command and control structures.  It is one of its main characteristics which "does not compute" in the West.  Some western apologists for Islam have argued that the authoritarian nature of Islam is not intrinsic to the religion itself, but reflects the more primitive authoritarian cultures in which it began and continue to this day. 

The basic thesis here is that various authoritarian cultures and societies have shaped Islam, giving it an authoritarian cast which is not germane to the doctrines and teachings of Muhammad.  As evidence for this idea, Western commentators cite thousands of Westernised Muslims who do not hold to the authoritarian structures found is almost all Islamic cultures and nations. 

A weakness in this thesis is that as Western Muslims come to take their religion more seriously, authoritarian command and control structures rear up once again.  In other words, the laid-back, easy-ozie Western Muslim is regarded as not true to the faith, but is compromised.  As soon as he is "converted" and becomes a strict Muslim, taking the classical teachings of the faith seriously,  he slots right into the prevailing Islamic authoritarian world view. 

Christianity is not a command and control philosophy or religion.

Prophetic Bombers

Anglican Church Definitively Condemned 

It seems inevitable that severe disruption of some kind, if not a split, is going to occur in the Anglican church.  This ought not discourage us on the face of it, for not all separations and splits are bad.  The call to "come out from among them and be ye separate, and touch not the unclean thing" (II Corinthians 6:17) remains, reminding us that it is the Living God Who is sovereign and His Word rules over churches, not the reverse.

What is discouraging is the extent of judicial blindness now manifest in the Anglican church.  The Telegraph recently presented the thinking of bishops via a report, compiled by a panel of bishops, and  issued by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York over the issue of homosexuality.  As is so often the case in such matters it is the childish, asinine reasoning that accompanies the attempt to justify what is wicked that reveals so much about the spiritual condition of the denomination.  What is the recommendation of the report?