One of the most remarkable features of the late-modern era has been the strange coalescence of an incessant call for ‘total emancipation’ from the shackles of alleged oppression with an explicit totalitarian drift in political life. This perplexing and apparently contradictory element of life in the West manifests itself in a constant clamouring amongst the citizenry for complete self-determination, equality and self-expression in the name of ‘justice,’ whilst looking to the state as the appropriate organ to legislate into existence the rights, entitlements and freedoms being demanded. The reformed philosopher Jan Dengerink is to the point:
To [central government] is ascribed a clear supremacy over all other basically non-political groups. . . . This clearly shows its out-workings in the socio-political activities of various Western democracies, with all of the structural and spiritual leveling that follows from it . . . the result is always a heavy-handed bureaucracy, which in practice reduces the individual citizen to a nullity, one in which the technocrats and social planners get the final say . . .[1]
1. Jan Dengerink, The Idea of Justice in Christian Perspective (Oshawa: Wedge Publishing, 1978), 3–4.
Statism Everywhere
In short, the majority of people have become statist in their thinking, implicitly or explicitly. The central meaning of statism is important to note. The presence of an ‘-ism’ should immediately alert the careful thinker to the possibility that there has been an exaggeration of a created and God-ordained structure (in this case the state) into something well beyond its intended function. Fundamentally, statism is a political system in which the sphere of civil government exerts substantial, centralized control over much of society, including the economy and various other spheres.
The dominance of statism today means that few people question anymore progressive, redistributive taxation (including inheritance taxes), national minimum wage laws, market interventionism, the suspension of civil liberties by unelected bureaucrats in the name of public health, state control and funding of medicine, education, charity and welfare, as well as a large share of the media such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), The United States’ National Public Radio (NPR), and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). In Britain, the National Health Service alone is one of the world’s largest employers.[2] The public sector has become so vast that most people have grown accustomed to the state’s omnipresence.
2. “The NHS is the World’s Fifth Largest Employer,” Nuffield Trust, last modified October 27, 2017.
The Church Swallowed up by the State
In this brave new world, the church herself is increasingly treated as little more than another social club with no more significance in culture than a cinema or sports team. Yet in the West we seem increasingly ready to allow the state to license, control, and regulate the churches. We seem ready to allow our churches to be locked them down indefinitely and at will if ‘public health’ functionaries of the state require it, and we cease pastoral counseling in biblical truth for those struggling with their sexuality.
This ‘omni-competent’ vision of the state has become so ubiquitous that many evangelical Christians have lost their cultural memory of God-given, pre-political institutions, rights, and responsibilities that are to be protected but are not created, controlled, or governed by the state. As a consequence, believers have floundered in their response to unprecedented and illegal lockdowns of the church, the growing collapse of civil liberties, the total control of education, expanded abortion, euthanasia, no-fault divorce law, the redefinition of marriage and family, homosexuality and transgender issues, largely because a scriptural world and life view norming our understanding of these questions and the role of the state with respect to them has collapsed. Instead, we have a liberal democratic and statist worldview drilled into us by the various organs of cultural life, where Jesus and a hope of heaven is spread on top as a sort of spiritual condiment giving religious flavor to secularism via the ministry of the churches.
What has become increasingly clear in recent decades is that we are entering an era of (a likely protracted) struggle for the freedom of the church in the West, not just with the state and its bureaucracy, but with various church movements themselves, some of whose leaders are emerging as committed apologists for statism! There has never been a shortage of cultural leaders ready to support and advise falling down before the image of the absolutist state when the music plays (see Daniel 3). As a result, when it comes to analysing threats to freedom from their own civil government, courts, and bureaucracy, Christians are generally poorly equipped, and at risk of sleepwalking toward tyranny.
The Sovereignty of God
This state of affairs is not just a problem, it is a tragedy, because it is the abandonment of the legacy of the reformation which gradually gave us both the free English national church and eventually liberty for non-conformity (via the Toleration Act in 1689), giving shape to the political life of the entire anglosphere. Abraham Kuyper, an heir of the same reformed tradition in Europe and who for a time served as Prime Minister of the Netherlands—a country with one of the richest legacies of Christian freedom from the time of William of Orange[3] – has pointed out that:
3. See Robert Louis Wilken, Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 99–117.
The dominating principle [of the Calvinistic side of the reformation] was not, soteriologically, justification by faith, but in the widest sense cosmologically, the Sovereignty of the Triune God over the whole Cosmos, in all its spheres and kingdoms, visible and invisible.[4]
4. Abraham Kuyper, Christianity as a Life-System: The Witness of a World-View (Memphis, TN: Christian Studies Centre, 1980), 27.
This meant emphatically that the state, as well as the church, must be understood as ordained of God and under His authority as His servant (Prov. 8:15–16; Rom. 13:1ff). In Romans 13, Paul specifically and explicitly places all authority under God—including civil government—as a sphere of power and authority instituted by Him alone. The apostle’s prescription concerning the state’s task as well as his exhortation against resisting God’s order in temporal authority, assumes that to do so resists God’s command, and so he presupposes the absolute sovereignty of God.
All God’s commands and ordinances need to be considered and obeyed. This is clear in Romans 13 as Paul goes on to teach that the civil authority is God’s servant—literally God’s deacon. The apostle explains that this entails being a terror to bad conduct and approving of good conduct, bearing the sword to avenge those that do wrong. But if the state becomes a terror to those who do good and rewards those who do evil, it is again in flagrant violation of God’s command and ordinance, and Christians have at that point a duty to resist an authority that has ceased to be God’s deacon. This explains why Paul spent so much time in prison and in the courts himself because he was deemed to be resisting authority. Were this not the case, we would be bound to state absolutism with no basis for resistance to tyranny of any and every kind. So, we are to obey God’s ordinance to submit to civil authorities and fulfill our obligations until the state moves against God’s norms and ordinances. In all other cases we obey for the sake of our conscience and to avoid unnecessary punishment.
For centuries this had been the dominant Christian view. As James Willson wrote in his outstanding commentary on Romans 13 in 1853, nothing can nullify the law of God:
To the best government, obedience can be yielded only in things lawful; for there is a “higher law” to which rulers and subjects are alike amenable. “The heavens do rule.” There is a God above us, and “to Him every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.[5]
5. James M. Willson, The Establishment and Limits of Civil Government: An Exposition of Romans 13:1–7 (Georgia: American Vision Press, 2009), 14–15.
In particular, Willson is diligent to expose the misuse of Romans 13 as a text promoting passive obedience and non-resistance in the face of evil and rebellion against God:
Paul did not intend by the language before us, to forbid even the forcible resistance of unjust and tyrannical civil magistrates, not even when that resistance is made with the avowed design of displacing offending rulers, or, it may be, the change of the very form of government itself . . . That question was settled in England by the revolution of 1688, when the nation, rising in its might, expelled James II as an enemy to the constitutional rights and liberties of the people. The separate national and independent existence of these United States is the fruit of successful revolution.[6]
6. Willson, The Establishment, 31. Willson’s exegetical argument, which cannot be explored here, is worth reading in full.
In 1 Timothy 2:1–2, Christians are also urged by the apostle Paul to pray and intercede for kings and those in authority. Contrary to implying some sort of unquestioning subservience, this command reveals the high mediatorial position of the believer and Christ’s instituted church. The believer is required to go to the sovereign ruler of the kings of the earth (Rev. 1:5), because of our status as a royal priesthood and holy nation before God (1 Pet. 2:9) and intercede for mercy and wisdom (or indeed judgment) to be upon earthly rulers, in order that God’s people be left in peace and freedom to live godly lives.
Conclusion
This perspective on God’s sovereignty constitutes the root of religious liberty, freedom of conscience and indeed true political liberty in the West. From the Christian standpoint, there is no absolute power or authority for Parliament congress, civil governments, or monarchs. All authority is delegated, limited, and under God in the various God-ordained spheres of life. In light of this, and because of the legitimate sword power given to the state, Kuyper rightly warns, “we must ever watch against the danger which lurks, for our personal liberty, in the power of the state.”[7] Professing Christians today have largely lost that vigilance which Kuyper enjoins. The spirit of the French Revolution and German philosophical pantheism permeating the West’s social democracies opposes God and recognizes no ground for a just state or political authority in anything other than man himself. “No God, no master” was a matter of confession for the French revolutionaries. On this view, all power and authority proceeds from man alone. Thus, the absolute sovereignty of the people or the state is confessional and practical atheism. This is not what the English constitutional arrangements had in mind with the idea of the sovereignty of Parliament, since it is the monarch’s Parliament, and elected leaders are invited by the monarch to form a government. The Head of State of the United Kingdom and Canada swears an oath, under the absolute sovereignty of Christ the King, to uphold the law and gospel of Christ and to defend that faith once for all delivered to the saints. State omnipotence then, is the opposite of biblical teaching (Dan. 2:21-24; Acts 17:7) and runs contrary to the history of the English Revolution and the legacy of the mother of all parliaments. On Oliver Cromwell’s tomb at Westminster Abbey, we read the epitaph (the battle cry of the Puritans), “Christ not man is King.”
7. Kuyper, Christianity as a Life-System, 28.
Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from a section in Joe Boot’s book, Ruler of Kings, available at Ezra Press.
