The Limits of State Power & the Christian Duty to the Lawful Authority
Until recently, few Christians - especially among Reformed Protestants - held a view that duty of the godly was to obey the civil authorities except when they commanded sin. Greater nuance is needed.
Questions regarding the limits of state power and the duty of Christians to submit to the governing authorities are relevant in every age. But in our current age, people do not seem to be thinking deeply or critically regarding state power.
On this week’s episode Drs. T. David Gordon and Michael J. Lynch join to discuss the historic position of Reformed Theologians and the theological concerns reflected in the teaching of the Reformed Confessions on Civil Authority and its limits.
At this year’s Reformation and Worship conference, one leading Reformed Theologian asserted that ecclesiastical responses to COVID taught him that Bible-believing Christians no longer believed in First Peter. He went on to explain that he thought many bible believing Christians no longer believe there is a duty to obey the State. But is this an accurate reflection? Is there a Christian duty simply to obey the governing authorities or is the Christian duty of submission more nuanced than that?
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In the same exchange, the esteemed and thoughtful Professor Carl Trueman suggested Christians in our day need to examine more seriously the questions of where state power ends and church power begins.
Indeed, recently many Christian leaders seem to have adopted the approach that unless the governing authorities require people to sin, the Christian duty of submission includes obedience.
But while that view does have historic precedent, it does not represent the mainstream view of Reformed Theologians and Christian thinkers. Instead, Christians have held to a belief that the lawful commands of the magistrate must be obeyed. But that Christian submission does not necessarily include obedience to unlawful commands of those in authority. And unlawful includes not only commands that violate God’s Law, but also commands violating the basic law of any commonwealth.
We see this principle biblically expressed in, for example, Acts 16 in which the magistrates order Paul and Silas to leave Philippi, but they refuse to do so on constitutional grounds. In the view of Paul (and Silas), the magistrates were acting unlawfully according to the basic laws of the commonwealth and in violation of their rights as Roman citizens. And so on that basis, they refused to obey; the issue immediately at hand was not that Paul and Silas had been commanded to disobey God’s Law, but rather that the magistrates had commanded Paul and Silas to do something they had no obligation to do under Roman Law. And so Paul and Silas refused to obey even as they continued in submission to the lawful authorities.
Likewise, the Reformed Confessions also recognized a Christian’s duty of submission includes obedience only insofar as the magistrate’s commands are lawful both in terms of God’s Law and the civil constitution of the realm. The Christian owes no obedience to a magistrate who exceeds the authority delegated to him by the basic law of that commonwealth. As Charles Hodge put it: “An unconstitutional law or commandment is a nullity; no man sins in disregarding it.”
Some members of the Westminster Assembly also suggested private disobedience of the magistrate was lawful if what he commanded was a matter of indifference to God’s Law. Thomas Manton, clerk at the Assembly and Chaplain to Cromwell, argued in his commentary on James:
submission to man may be performed by suffering the penalty, though the obedience required be forborne; and in some cases a man may do contrary in private, where the thing is indifferent, and there is no danger of scandal and contempt of authority.
So while a Christian must not foment contempt toward the lawful authorities, submission to lawful authority does not necessarily entail obedience all the time. For the sake of Christian conscience, Christian charity, and Christian unity, a more careful, nuanced, and historically informed understanding of the godly duty is needed in this area. Drs. Gordon and Lynch provide vital perspective on these matters.