Father Greg and I have both posted on our respective blogs on the issue of just revolution lately. When is a revolution moral by Christian standards? This is very important because the claim of many of us is that the USA has a basic Christian foundation.
I think that it is beyond the shadow of a doubt that the cultural milieu within which the American colonies were founded was mostly one of either the Radical Reformation or of the Dissenters (I am using Dissenters here in the way in which it would have been used in England.) In particular, the Bill of Rights was written to ensure that the suppression of Radical Reformers and Dissenters which took place in Europe and England would not happen again. At the same time, the same Bill of Rights was intended to protect those who were of little religion, such as those of our Founding Fathers who followed a more Deist turn of thinking. Nevertheless, while the American Constitution is written to reflect a rather broad protection of freedom of thought and practice, it is beyond question that actual federal regulations and state laws of that time clearly reflected a much more “Christian” viewpoint, as did the writings of the majority of the Founding Fathers and other legislators. This has made for a fertile field of arguments as our culture has changed.
Nevertheless, let me return to my original question. When is a revolution moral by Christian standards? You see, if the American Revolution was not moral, then, regardless of other arguments, our nation is not founded on Christian morality, but rather on a massive act of immoral disobedience which casts its shadow over our foundations. Can that which is founded on immorality be itself moral? You must understand that our Founding Fathers took this as a very serious question. Why do I say this? Read the Declaration of Independence adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776. At its beginning, our Founders clearly state:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Please note that they comment that out of a decent respect for the “opinions of mankind” they need to declare the reasons that justify their revolution. But, it is just a little troubling to see that they do not appeal to the God of the Bible, rather they appeal to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Uhm, should I point out that many of today’s Evangelicals would say that “Nature’s God” is not the Biblical God? Their next paragraph, the preamble, is the one to which we all point to as our justification for a revolution. Nevertheless, though it appeals to a “Creator” nowhere does it actually quite quote Scripture or even parallel or paraphrase clearly Biblical thought. It says:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
In fact, this type of argument parallels the same argument made in China by the Zhou Dynasty (1122-256 BC). They justified the overthrow of the Shang Dynasty with a concept known as the Mandate of Heaven. That is, Heaven would bless a just ruler but would be displeased and withdraw its mandate from a despotic ruler. The Mandate of Heaven would then transfer to those who would rule best. How did you know if the Mandate of Heaven had passed on? Well, Chinese historians said that you knew that the Mandate had passed on if the revolution was successful. I must admit that this seems a rather self-serving viewpoint! However, check out our preamble above. How did our Founding Fathers know that the “Mandate of Heaven”–or at least the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”–had changed and given permission for a revolt? Well, in two ways. The first way was that the King had become a despot (“to reduce them under absolute Despotism”). The second way is that we won.
The Founding Fathers had to deal with the idea of the “Divine right of kings“, which had been explicitly written about by people such as James I and the Carolignian Divines (and many others before them). A typical quote of this type of thinking is, “Just as no misconduct on the part of a father can free his children from obedience to the fifth commandment, so no misgovernment on the part of a king can release his subjects from their allegiance.” And, this is a rather powerful quote, as none of the Founding Fathers ever argued that a child had a right to disobey his parents. Plus this type of quote is clearly part of the parallelisms found in books such as Ephesians which speak of master and slave, husband and wife, parents and children. It is a very appropriate parallelism to speak of king and subject in the same way as master and slave.
So, the Founding Fathers had to find a way to break that chain of reasoning. The preamble and the eighteen reasons that follow are their philosophical attempt to break the chain of reasoning that went from Romans 13 through Ephesians (and Colossians and Peter, etc.). But, there has been an unintended (at least by the Founding Fathers) consequence of their breaking that chain. Their descendants (all of us USA citizens) have had to deal with arguments about the rest of the chain. Look down USA history. Little by little the links of the chain have been altered. You can forget any talk about master and servant in this country. In fact, unions were and are the in-house revolt against despotic employers. Wives are now legally rather independent of their husbands. And, children have independent rights that are enforced by the courts. In fact, parents can even be disenfranchised if they misbehave badly enough towards their children. I find it interesting that very conservative Christians, through the last couple of hundred years of USA existence, have consistently argued against the very societal changes we take for granted. You can find many (no not just a few extremists, rather many) Christians arguing against a mandatory end to slavery, against increasing rights for women, against increasing rights for minors.
Every one of the arguments against slavery, for women, for minors attempts to base itself on the New Testaments writings. But … but … but every one of the arguments parallels the arguments that the Founding Fathers made against the English King. The argument was that despotism frees one from obligation. In every case, the counterargument by those who wanted to prevent change was that a benevolent king, a benevolent master, a benevolent husband, and benevolent parents would never behave that way and that laws ought to be passed only for the protection against despotic kings, despotic masters, despotic husbands, and despotic parents, but not passed in such a way that they diminished or changed the role of kings, masters, husbands, and parents. They further argued that to pass such “revolutionary” laws was to violate Scripture. Nevertheless, the chain had been broken in the American Revolution, and the result was and has been (to this day) a continuing revolution that has weakened each chain in the link of relationships that is found in books such as Ephesians, Colossians, and Peter. So, I would argue that the reasoning of the American Revolution had as its direct consequence the changing of laws governing the relationships between king and subjects, master and servants, husband and wife, parents and children. A side question is, was this change Biblical or not?
So this brings us back to the question about the American Revolution. Was it moral?
[NOTE: I AM NOT NOT NOT ARGUING FOR A RETURN TO OLD LAWS ON KINGS, MASTERS, HUSBANDS, AND PARENTS. But, I am pointing out that there are some philosophical connections here.]
===MORE TO COME===
Let me stir the pot: Free Englishmen asserting their rights as free Englishmen against the usurpations of a German born king…. and was it moral for the USA to help and encourage Cuba in its revolution against Spain?
There is little doubt that there was strong American feeling in favor of a free Cuba. But even back then, there was a strong viewpoint that the conflict–which was called the splendid little war by then Col. Theodore Roosevelt–had more to do with getting some helpful properties from Spain than it had to do with Cuban freedom. After all, after the conflict, the USA ended up as owner of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. More than one historian has said that the reason Cuba got its freedom after four years had to more to do with public sentiment and with justifying the conflict than it did with purely moral reasoning.
Out of the conflict, the USA got to build four naval bases: Guantanamo, Subic Bay, Sumay, and Viekes, all of which helped the USA significantly extend its armed power. In passing, there are those who say that the Philippines would not have received their freedom in 1946 had it not been for popular post-WWII sentiment and the personal push of General McArthur. Otherwise, they, too, would have remained as part of the USA.
Of course not!
God save the Queen! 😉
Ah, The Scylding stole my thunder. I guess I would have to rejoin with a cry that should come from Latin America: !Viva el Rey de España!
The Pennsylvania Germans struggled with the revolution because of the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms. Some felt that they should remain loyal to the king because he was ordain by God to rule and the British government invited them to America.
Interesting, thanks.
Thanks, I just had to edit it just a little. I noticed that there was a very unclear sentence.
Theodore Roosevelt was a comunist ass. Yes the American revolution was Moral you are not. You can rot in hell!
Yes, lots of good logical thinking there, not. Roosevelt died before the Soviet Union existed. And, your language does say something about your personal morality, does it not?
Two things you argued here are wrong and kind of demonstrate you don’t have much depth on this subject:
1) “And, this is a rather powerful quote, as none of the Founding Fathers ever argued that a child had a right to disobey his parents.”
Thomas Paine technically argued that America was a nation of immigrants who were held no paternalistic obligations to the mother country, though I believe they would still have been subject to Common Law, which I will get to in a moment.
Paine also argued that if Britain were really a mother nation to the Americas that it wouldn’t have abused the colonies the way that it did. (Various military actions were taken against the colonies during the 11 years of peaceful protest preceding the war.)
British Common Law doesn’t give any paternalistic authority to the government or the crown over the colonies, their land or the individual English citizens living within them. The Parliament claimed to derive it’s authority from the people it governed, IE, the fact that the people’s interests were represented in the Parliament by the delegates who convened there.
William Knox, a STAUNCH and PROFUSE supporter of the crown *admitted both of these facts in his own writings*, in the same which writings he proceeded to condemn the actions of the colonies. (Knox, ‘On American Taxation’, 1769)
Wherefore, British government by it’s own terms, law and history going back to the 1600s, as ALL legitimate moral government according to the precedents and morals of God laid out in the Bible, is based upon a covenant of laws that mediate the relationship between the ruler and the ruled.
And we all know what the result of breaking a covenant is: The rendering of the concessions and obligations of the other party to the offending party null and void.
2) “So, the Founding Fathers had to find a way to break that chain of reasoning.”
The dispute over the ‘divine right of kings’ had been settled since the 1600s when the Magna Carta was signed and British Common Law was established.
The end of the disputes of the reformation saw the moral truths put in place that said, first, God condemned monarchy and heredity loudly in the scriptures. For this reason they established a Parliament to represent the interests of the people and check what had been the ungodly and violent acts of the king against the people.
Next it set forth that, because God chose the rulers of the Judges from among the people of Israel, peoples must also have a God given precedent and approval to choose for themselves their rulers from among their own people instead of having them placed upon them by force. This was also a justification of the Parliament which was established at that time.
They also set forth that any system of government should be based on the moral role and responsibilities God laid out for government under the Law of Moses and the rest of the scriptures. This meant that, in effect, that any act of a government that was not to directly serve the purposes God had put forth for it in the Bible or that fit the descriptions of oppression and abuses of worldly governments God condemns, was not permissible or considered a legitimate function of British government.
In this way, when the Kings of England began to try to find ways to circumvent pre-existing law or to confound the Parliament from representing the people from whom the King was supposed to derive his legitimacy from, he would be found in violation of the Magna Carta and the people were more than welcome to resist those actions.
And these are exactly the claims we find laid out in the Deceleration of Independence, whereby we come to understand that the acts of the crown were illegitimate and criminal which gave the colonies, an equally legitimate portion of the empire with English citizens, its justification to back out of the broken covenant of British Common Law and British parliamentary rule.
Let me go on to make a point of my own:
This last counter point I made actually carries great heft: Even in the time at which GOD was the King of Israel and Moses put forth the covenant of the Old Law before them, GOD asked the people whether or not they would agree to the terms of HIS government. What King is greater than GOD, that he can put an eternal indissoluble covenant upon a people by force which he himself is not bound to keep but they are?
Further, this covenant held no paternalistic force. Every generation had the right to depart the nation of Israel and serve some other nation or god if they so chose. Joshua expressed this right by acknowledging it before entering Canaan to demonstrate to the people his confidence both that the Lord was the most just and best option to follow but that they too were making this decision if they continued onward: Joshua 24:15, “And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the LORD, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.”
Since British government, just as was mentioned earlier with reference to the words of William Knox, carried no legitimate paternalistic claim to the property or persons of it’s citizens, if such citizens determined that the covenant of their system had been broken by the Parliament and the crown, they could depart from it not only with their lives, but their property as well. And that would be perfectly biblical.
I believe, since the Law of Moses applies to all governments that are just and legitimate in the eyes of God, that a government doesn’t have the right to ask more of me anything but the bare necessities it needs in order to carry out justice and defense. “Thou Shall Not Steal” and “Thou Shalt Not Murder”, applies as much to the government as it does to any individual, which means I am well within God’s approval to resist if the government is taking more from me than what I am able to bear and still feed my family and carry out my other pre-existing God given responsibilities, which are laid out by a higher older authority under a higher older law.
Still further, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”, doesn’t mean to give up life and limb and become a martyr to an abusive out of control government, nor is there any directive given by Christ or God in the New Testament that affirms that this is the expectation of God for Christians concerning obedience to government. God reassured us that we would suffer persecution, but that doesn’t mean that God approves of or sanctions that persecution. While we may be expected to endure and suffer under bad government, we are supposed to preach against it and resist it if we have legitimate authority to do so, as in the cases where government is committing crimes against the individuals it purports to be established for the good of, in violation to God’s morality and principles.
And don’t mention the Roman Empire to me: God ultimately judged the Roman Empire for it’s sins in the book of Revelation and described the saints as being well within their rights to resist using it’s money, avoiding it’s influence and ultimately, departing it with the sum of their goods.
It seems the rest of your quarrels with the modern United States have to do with the fact that we are no longer a Christian nation, not a British nation. We would be no more of a moral or Christian nation today if we had stayed a part of the British empire; quite the contrary, there is no more pagan and agnostic society on the earth today than modern Britain, save those in the barbarous and anarchic portions of the third world. None of the immorality of this nation has come about from departing the British system so far as departing from God’s system, which stands as a constant judge irrespective of a person’s nationality or citizenry.
So in conclusion, while Christians have no earthly kingdom, every kingdom is subject to the same rules of morality and covenant keeping as any individual, and no individual has a paternalistic obligation to obey ungodly laws, to become a martyr to a kingdom that abuses and slaughters them, nor to give up their ownership of the property which they have earned, at least as much as they need to subsist, which God grants them ownership of through the laws of morality laid out in both the Old Law and in the moral expectation God sets forth for a family member to provide for their family, implying that God expects them to be given, by government reign over at least what they need to fulfill God’s expectations first before those of the government to which they are also subject.
In so much as these things are the case, I believe the America Revolution was perfectly moral, provided William Knox was lying in his claim that the colonies were offered representation in Parliament, which I cannot imagine was anything more than a passive attempt at conciliation on behalf of loyalists which would never have come to fruition.
God bless the form of the system of this republic and our legitimate Constitution, whose laws echo the authority of the Divine, herald the God given responsibilities of the individual over those the government would ascribe them and acknowledges that all government is instituted for the good of man, not man for the good of government.
I do hope we return to our Christian principles and live as a moral society someday soon. Otherwise, we cannot hope to survive as a nation. Amen.
I do promise to reply to your writings. But, (since I supposedly know so little) I do know that the Magna Carta was signed in 1215 originally, not in the 1600’s as you claimed. A quick reading shows you also have other similar errors in your reply. And while freemen could not be punished except by the law of the land, serfs were not freemen and could be punished at will.
When and where did I state that the Magna Carta was signed in the 1600s? The Magna Carta was one of the several justifications cited for forming the Parliamentary system as a result of Britain’s civil wars which took place in the 1600s. I ventured at saying “At least since the 1600s”, but I figured if you understood what I was suggesting, it wouldn’t be necessary to go back before that point. Clearly you did not, and should definitely reread what I’ve stated here before responding again.
And I did not get into the classes of early Jewish society because I believed you had understanding about the context in which the Old Law was given. Let me expound upon this for your benefit and the unlearned that might misunderstand what you have suggested.
The context of some of the rules of the Old Law obviously reflected the ability to understand or the lack thereof the spirit of what the Lord was asking the people to do at the time due to the pollution of the cultures and ideas they had been subjected to for so long living in Egypt. The moral teachings of God, the roles and responsibilities assigned to the people vs. those of the government AND the 10 commandments reflect no such contextual need of the people to whom they were being given.
And if that is not self evident, please refer to the fact that William Blackstone, the great philosopher of British Common Law, and the fact that he attributed the form and intent of Common Law to the arrangement God set in order among the people of Israel. British Common Law is the self same system, mind you, under which that it was later and first determined that slavery was immoral and to be outlawed.
To make this even more immensely obvious that there is a contrast between the spirit of the law and some of the rules given to the people of Israel for their benefit to be instructed into an understanding of the will of God within the cultural biases they still held at the time, please read Galatians 3:23-29.
Looking forward to your further comments.
Ah actually I did misspeak; What I meant to express was that the British Parliament signed their Constitution which cited the Magna Carta as authorization to establish British Common Law and the Parliamentary system.
But this is not a logical dispute; The struggle to establish the Parliamentary system ended the debate of whether the king had a ‘divine right’ or not. I am still correct, so I can still soundly dismiss your dispute.
However, what I stated about Jewish culture at the time the Old Law was given is wholly accurate, due to Galatians 3. Carry on.