Posted on 08/05/2014 7:14:54 AM PDT by SoFloFreeper
A father explains to his son why the Founding Fathers were justified in overthrowing the rule of King George...
There is a recurring—albeit ill-informed—question in Christian circles regarding Romans 13 (which counsels dutiful subordination to legally established authorities) and the American Revolution: Were the Founding Fathers in sin when they rebelled against King George?
Most recently, my son (a Harvard- and Yale-educated Mayo Clinic doctor who performs heart and lung transplants daily but does not have a lot of time for historiography) asked me for some references he could read to help answer this question, which was raised by some of his friends at church. This is my response:
Archer,
I am not in my library, and thus not in a good position right now to refer you to works of scholarship, but I can briefly explain the position and why it is incorrect.
Your friends are reading Romans 13 and assuming from its admonition to obey the duly constituted authorities that any rebellion is necessarily wrong. This is incorrect, as follows.
1. Unlawful orders—even of duly constituted authority—may never lawfully be followed. E.g., in the case of the Sanhedrin’s ordering of the apostles to cease preaching Christ, their response was, “We must obey God rather than men.” Likewise, should a leader command the murder of 6 million Jews, or a husband command the abortion of his child, those so ordered not only may not but also must not obey. (Your mother reminds me to note the Egyptian midwives here also.)
2. God Himself shows us repeatedly the lawful overthrow of duly constituted governments, both by conquest and by internal processes. The most relevant of these is David’s displacement of Saul as king of Israel. This took place in two steps: First, the elders of Judah, Benjamin, and Simeon seceded from the united kingdom and established David as king of an independent kingdom of Judah. Later, the elders of the northern tribes elected David as their king also.
This teaches us two things (well, actually, two things relevant to this abbreviated discussion today): First, that in the system of government God personally designed, the legislative body (admittedly a bit less of a Congress and more of a constitutional convention, but elected and representative, which is the principal point) had power to elect and to dismiss kings; and second, that this power was in fact used lawfully, more than once (it comes up again after David’s death as well) and with God’s express approval.
3. In Anglo-American law, a parliament may not tax or otherwise encumber (such as with military service) a jurisdiction that has no representation in that parliament. This, of course, was the principal point of the American Revolution, and the principal constitutional debate within the United Kingdom at the time, as well. The London Parliament asserted its (unlawful and unprecedented) right to legislate for all subjects of the Crown, whereas the Jacobites (supporters of the restoration of the Stuarts) became the defenders of the historic constitutional tenet that though the king ruled over all, parliaments must be local and representative in nature with jurisdiction only over that territory from which they had been elected. (The irony of the party espousing the divine right of kings taking this quasi-republican position is a discussion best left for another day.)
In any case, when the London Parliament began imposing taxes, levies, quartering of soldiers, and other unlawful requirements upon 13 English provinces, each with its own parliament (the king being the chief executive of each one separately, the royal governor being his representative locally, just as governors-general represent the queen in Australia or Barbados today), it caused a constitutional crisis in the Colonies. England had largely neglected the Colonies early on because of the Civil War and then the Commonwealth and Restoration, and barely more than two more decades passed before the Glorious Revolution. During this long period of preoccupation, the Colonies had developed as though they were Scotland or Ireland, with their own institutions and their citizens possessed of the fullness of the rights of Englishmen. But when the French and Indian War (which to the English was the Seven Years War, the first truly global conflict) greatly stretched the Exchequer, the feeling in London was that the Colonies should be expected to pay “their fair share.” And thus the long descent to Revolution began.
It is important for you to re-read the Declaration of Independence, which after this email I suspect you will see through new eyes. You will find that, though it never references Romans 13, the entire document is a justification of independence, to people who knew Romans 13 well, in terms of the king having broken covenant with his subjects. And it is that last bit to which I’m seeking to draw your attention.
Anglo-American government is by covenant. Even in England, the king is not sovereign; Parliament is. And the colonists—law-abiding Englishmen, regardless of the province in which they happened to reside—were in covenant with a king who ceased keeping that covenant, and who allowed them to be rendered slaves rather than free men, that freedom being their lawfully acknowledged birthright.
This took on a rather different character after the Boston Tea Party, in consequence of which the London Parliament ordered the naval blockade of the Port of Boston and the cessation of all lawful commerce therein. This is to this very day in international law an act of war, and the colonists rightly understood it to be an act of war by the London Parliament against the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. They sought redress from their king—whose veto was absolute and in whom was vested supreme command of the Royal Navy—but he did nothing. Quite the contrary: He took the position of the London Parliament and enforced it. And over time the offenses mounted, from the Boston Massacre to the passage of bills of attainder to the military occupation of American cities and the dismissal of American parliaments.
In this environment, which broke into actual hostilities beginning in April 1775, the Colonial leaders sought what might be considered transatlantic marriage counseling and reconciliation for an extensive period. But when the king refused to relent from the equivalent of wife-beating and adultery, they came to the conclusion not only that the covenant had been broken but also that it ought to be broken. The Declaration of Independence was neither entered into lightly nor without abuses above and beyond those required for a lawful exit. To support the king was to reject right and support sin, period. The Revolution was no different in this regard than the refusal of Judah to accept Jeroboam as their king. It was the king who left his American subjects and provinces, not the other way around.
Your friends will at this point say something about Rome, and note that Paul was speaking to people under a far worse regime when under the Spirit’s inspiration he wrote Romans 13. They will be right, so far as that goes. But these are apples and oranges. Again, I will leave a proper discussion of Roman citizenship, and of Roman rule in Israel, for another day, but Scripture must interpret Scripture, and Romans 13 is only applicable to lawful commands no matter what position you take (see item 1 above). And as to America, each separate colony—like each of England, Scotland, and Ireland—was in covenant with the king, a covenant that was shattered by that king, who began daily giving unlawful orders both to them and to others regarding them. The colonists were right to rebel and were completely within their rights to rebel, not only by the precedent of Scripture but (crucially) by the terms of the constitution of the United Kingdom, of the principles of the Glorious Revolution, and of the English Bill of Rights.
Most likely your friends will not have an adequate answer to that, nor can they have without becoming scholars in this area, something they will not wish to do. If they wish to discuss this, though, I will be happy to make some time to visit with them for your sake.
Love,
Dad
P.S. If your friends would like a more explicitly Presbyterian answer, have them read John Knox, or better yet, Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex (the title of which means “the law is the king,” the exact opposite of the dominant political theory of his time, which was rex lex, or “the king is the law”). In reading this, they will start to understand our Founding Fathers, a large percentage of whom were good Presbyterians, far far better.
For later reference.
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Today’s philosophy is that there is no truth, or whatever is going on in your brain is the only reality. Not much going on in there is the problem.
There are many right here on FR who when you pin them don’t will tell you the Founding Fathers are guilty of the sin of rebellion and so this country was founded on a sinful act.
I always ask them if they have repented by giving up their U.S. citizenship and swearing their allegiance and returning themselves to the rule of the Court of St. James and the House of Winsor, yet it seems that none have and that they continue to live in sin.
As people of the Enlightenment, I would submit that this was less important to the Founders than liberty. They were well-aware of the blood that ran in the streets and battlefields of Europe secondary to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation (some of their ancestors left Europe because of this). They did not want those religious wars here and that is one reason why we have no state church and why they kept religion—though not God the Creator—out of our founding documents.
The answer however, is a good treatise to digest
Please do not pick, but water and fertilize ..
thank you
I reject the attempt to justify the American revolution from the scriptures.
Natural rights are God-given. Human nature as a rational being is God-created. A rational being has certain requirements in order to live the life proper to a rational being.One of those requirements is natural rights. The government exists for no other purpose than to secure, preserve, and protect those rights. Any government that violates natural rights, even if were legally established, contradicts God, and deserves to be rebelled against or overthrown in order to leave the individual free to pursue his own individual happiness and live a life proper to a rational being.
It has been my observation that many American Christians seem to identify their nation with the kingdom of God taught in the New Testament. The good ol’ US of A, however, is just that, a secular nation, not the kingdom of God.
The founders founded a secular nation, not a theocracy, not the kingdom of God. Neither were they devout Christians, as many seem to think, the main ones were Deists and Freemasons who believe there is a supreme being, but he is not the God of the Bible.
Using these Biblical passages from Romans, therefore, to try to make the Deist founders sinners is silly.
It’s blasphemous to suggest that Man is capable of creating a “Kingdom of God.”
No
It was written in the context of the Roman Empire, which crushed rebels with crucifixion, slavery (sexual and otherwise), and genocide. Arguing for a right to rebel based on taxation is unscriptural.
New tagline alert!
Great post.
That wasn’t the argument. You obviously didn’t read the piece.
Paul wrote Rom. 13 under the Roman rule. They were corrupt and brutal. Eventually they chopped off his head. And he still wrote to comply with government.
King George may have been crackers, but he wasn’t Nero.
Our nation began in rebellion, and rebellion is in our DNA. We may pragmatically say that much good came from the rebellion over the last 200 years, but we also sowed seeds which are now growing into bitter fruit.
You have read the Declaration of Independence for a start, and you DO realize that the Revolutionary War wasn’t merely about taxation?
The thing to remember is that people and political systems are not static. Remember the Roman Republic lasted for centuries and was the source of the stanchion that led Roman Armies, SPQR ( Senātus Populus que Rōmānus "The Senate and People of Rome"), which indicated the primacy of the Senate as the power of Rome.
Of course Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar kept the facade of the Senate being superior and that remained true through to almost the end of the united Roman Empire. Hmmm, sound familiar?
bump for later
I would accept this IF you use the term 'Liberal' in its classic sense and definition; a political philosophy and ideology in which primary emphasis is placed on securing the freedom of the individual by limiting the power of the government. The transmogrification of the word 'liberal' is one of the great word crimes of the 1900s!
To illustrate; It would be niggardly of me if I were to gayly accept current liberal values as being protective of individual rights!
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