June 25, 2024 Show with Dr. Glenn Sunshine on “Slaying Leviathan: Limited Government & Resistance In the Christian Tradition”

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But today we have a first -time guest joining us. I'm very excited to have him on, and I'm very excited that so many of you listening seemed to be equally as excited as I am to have this brother on, according to your responses in social media.

Today my guest is Dr. Glenn Sunshine, and we are going to be addressing his book,

Slaying Leviathan, Limited Government and Resistance in the

Christian Tradition. Dr. Sunshine is former professor of history at Central Connecticut University and a senior faculty member of the

Colson Fellows. He's also founder and president of Every Square Inch Ministries and the author of a number of books, including the one we are addressing today,

Slaying Leviathan. It's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio, Dr.

Glenn Sunshine. Well, thank you for having me on. And we have a tradition here on Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio, Dr.

Sunshine, whenever we have a first -time guest on, we have that guest provide for my listeners a summary of their salvation testimony, which would include any kind of religious atmosphere in which you were raised, if any, and what kind of providential circumstances our

Sovereign Lord raised up in your life that drew you to Himself and saved you. So let's hear a summary of your story.

Well, I grew up in a household that it would be generous to call it nominally

Catholic. My parents would take me to and my brothers to church on Sunday morning and then would go home.

We would attend church, then go to Sunday school, and then they'd come pick us up. They didn't even attend church on Christmas and Easter.

So they, like many Catholic families, they wanted to have us go through the process through confirmation.

And then after that, we were kind of on our own. In my case, I was really quite interested in,

I suppose you would call it spiritual things. In junior high, I was actually starting to look into the occult and things like that.

Well, fortunately, at that point, it was not easy to find material.

If I were doing that today in junior high, I would have been in a lot more trouble. I couldn't get into a lot of trouble at that point because there wasn't a lot of stuff available back in the early 1970s.

But then one of my brothers came to faith. He became a believer.

And we were at his house on my mother's birthday, September 19th, 1971. He started trying to evangelize my mother.

He was talking about the Bible. I thought that sounded interesting. So I sat in and started listening. My mother walked away.

Barry still had an audience, so he kept talking and explained the gospel to me. And I heard it in terms

I understood then for the first time. And I just accepted it.

I believed it. Because one thing I got from the Catholic Church is I've always been taught to believe that the

Bible was the word of God. Nobody suggested that I read it. But I had, you know,

I believed that that was God's word. And when Barry showed me what was actually in it, I said, OK, well, this has got to be the truth.

And I went with it. Yeah, that's interesting. I was from a very religiously Roman Catholic household and had the same kind of reverence for the word of God.

And even before I was a born -again believer, always believed that Jesus existed.

I believed that he was and is God. But the same also experience of having the idea that, hey, the

Bible is a very important book and it's the word of God, but, you know, you don't really need to go crazy about reading it.

I mean, we do have priests, after all, to explain things to you. But thank God I was saved by the grace of Jesus Christ in the mid -1980s.

But tell me how you came to discover and embrace Reformed theology.

Well, from there, I actually passed through a whole succession of different types of churches.

I've actually, at one time or another, been in every major branch of Western Christianity except the

Anabaptists, because whenever I moved, I found myself a good church that was preaching the gospel and just settled in there.

But really, I started landing very heavily in the Reformed camp in college.

I was at University Reformed Church at Michigan State. And from there,

I moved into an Orthodox Presbyterian church when I graduated in Maryland.

My wife was Lutheran, so when I went to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School for my

MA degree, we were Lutheran for a little while. But then I was in Christian Reformed Church in grad school and at my first job at teaching at Calvin College.

And by this point, I was really rather thoroughly steeped in the Reformed tradition.

I did my doctoral work on the Huguenots, so again, in the

Calvinist world. And it was just a matter of, as I learned, as I grew, as I was exposed to solid expository preaching from a

Reformed perspective, it just seemed obvious that that was the most biblically faithful thing I could run into. Well, praise

God. And just to let our listeners know, who may be wondering, our guest is a member of a congregation in the

Presbyterian Church in America, also known as the PCA. Have you ever written a book on the

Huguenots? Because I would love to do an interview on that topic. I don't believe I've ever dedicated a two -hour interview specifically to the

Huguenots. Yeah. Unfortunately, it's out of print. I'm trying to get it back in print.

It was called Reforming French Protestantism. The theme, the topic of the book, it was actually my doctoral work.

It turns out that Presbyterian Church government was invented by the French. And so what

I did is I traced how and why that happened. It covers the period from about 15, well, there's some background here, but really 1557 through 1572.

And during that period, the French really come up with the first systematic

Presbyterian form of church government. And like I said, I look at the how and why that all that happens.

That's interesting since they did drive Calvin out of France. But that is an interesting concept to know.

In fact, I think very often that credit is often given to Scotland, if I'm not mistaken.

But it's interesting to know that that's where you have discovered the origins are.

Well, I do have a couple of publishers I will let you know about off the air. And who knows where that may lead, because I would love to see that book come into print.

Well, we are discussing your book Slaying Leviathan, Limited Government and Resistance in the

Christian Age. Tell us why you used this figure found in the

Old Covenant Scriptures of the Leviathan to picture what we are addressing today.

There's a lot of disagreements, even amongst Bible -believing Christians, even amongst

Reformed Christians, as to the importance or meaning of the

Leviathan, whether it is a dinosaur, whether it is a beast that is common to even the 21st century

Earth that we now live in, or whether it is more symbolic. Even Satan has been suggested.

Tell us, why did you use this term? Well, actually it has nothing to do with the

Old Testament, or only indirectly. It's actually a reference to a book by Thomas Hobbes called

Leviathan. Leviathan was a book that Hobbes published in the 17th century, 1600s, in which he was arguing for absolute government.

The king is an absolute monarch. The term Leviathan, he picked

Leviathan as a term to describe this. And it came from the idea that people in this period thought that the name

Leviathan referred to the idea of something that is made up of a monster that had scales that were very tightly compacted together.

And so the idea here that Hobbes was using is that the state is

Leviathan, the country is Leviathan, all of the people are like the scales of Leviathan that are pulled together into a tight unified whole with the king as the head.

So the king is the head of the state, and just like the head of a creature controls everything that happens in it, so the king should control everything that happens in the state, up to and including deciding matters of religion.

So that was what Hobbes was arguing in Leviathan. And, in fact, when you look at the

Christian tradition, that kind of absolutist notion of how government should operate really is antithetical to the church going all the way back to the days of Jesus.

And so the title slang Leviathan has to do with the idea that the church has always stood in opposition to this idea of absolute government, of totalitarianism, of any idea of that sort, that the state is unlimited in its power.

Now, I was not even aware of how strongly, vociferously, and adamantly

Christians disagreed over this issue, even within the same theological circles, even within sometimes the same denominations, and even within the same congregations, until the whole

COVID crisis came to be. And we began to see local and federal governments mandating things that made our lives more miserable and sometimes even tragically caused people to lose their livelihoods, even lose businesses that their families owned for centuries.

And to this day, we continue to feel the repercussions of this.

And I had Christians on this program who took opposite sides of just to what extent do we follow

Romans 13. Now, obviously, every Bible -believing

Christian believes that Romans 13 is God -breathed and we are to obey it. But how are we to exegete these passages is something that is disagreed over.

In fact, let me just read the relevant passages to what we're discussing here.

Every person is to be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God.

Therefore, whoever resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God, and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves, for rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior but for evil.

Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same, for it is a servant of God to you for good.

But if you do what is evil, be afraid, for it does not bear the sword for nothing, for it is a servant of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices it.

Therefore, it is necessary to be in subjection, not only because of wrath but also for the sake of conscience, for because of this you also pay taxes, for rulers are servants of God, devoting themselves to this very thing.

Pay to all what is due them, tax to whom taxes due, custom to whom custom, respect to whom respect, honor to whom honor.

And this is a passage that you had brothers in Christ from the same churches vehemently disagreeing, how we apply that, and before I even have you discuss that in more detail, that very passage

I cited, was the COVID situation what provoked you to even write this book, and the way that governments even globally were reacting to this crisis, or was it something else, something perhaps even prior?

Well, actually, I had studied resistance theory in grad school, and well,

I did a podcast, I'm on a podcast called the Theology Podcast with two other guys, and we did an episode fairly early on this topic, and for quite a while it was our most popular episode, and that led me to think that people were really hungry to get some information on this, so I wrote it, and the book was actually published on Election Day 2020.

So I had been working on it well before COVID hit.

Wow, that's providential. And so then you have this providential occurrence that is creating turmoil all over the globe, and really disrupting the lives of multitudes, and we have people of opposite political persuasions arguing, and we have people within the same political persuasions arguing.

So the Christians, of course, immediately, those who are familiar with their scriptures, go to Romans 13, and how does a person who believes that this is

God -breathed truth, how does one simultaneously also say, well, we can resist government when it is surpassing or overreaching the spheres of their duties and responsibilities?

Well, in a lot of ways that's really the theme of the book. The reason why

I would argue that people read Romans 13 in a frankly rather simplistic way is they don't know the long discussions that have been taking place over literally centuries trying to come to grips with understanding the relationship between church and state, and what exactly are the limitations on government power and things like that.

And this starts all the way with Jesus. I mean, you know, the render to Caesar the things that are

Caesar's, we look at that and we say, well, that was a genius statement that got him out of trouble, and it basically says, yeah, we should be paying our taxes.

But there's a lot more to it than that. When you look at what he's saying, give to Caesar what's Caesar's and give to God what's

God's, what that says is that Caesar has legitimate authority. There are things that properly do belong to Caesar, but not everything does.

And the distinction between what is Caesar's and what isn't is actually not a decision

Caesar makes, it's a decision God makes. So whenever we're in a situation in which there is a question, one of the first things we need to ask is, is this

Caesar's responsibility or is this God's responsibility? So when

Caesar says something like you can go to the casino, but you can't go to church, is it

Caesar's job to tell you you cannot meet together corporately for worship?

Or is that something that belongs to God? Amen. Well, we're going to pick up.

I was going to say we're going to pick up. We're going to pick up right where you left off there, which is an extremely important point.

After we come back from our first commercial break. So if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question for Dr.

Glenn Sunshine on his book, Slaying Leviathan, Limited Government and Resistance in the

Christian Tradition, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

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go to royaldiadem .com today and mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We're now back with our guest,

Dr. Glenn Sunshine. We're discussing his book Slaying Leviathan, Limited Government and Resistance in the

Christian Tradition. And our email address, again, is chrisarnson at gmail .com. If you have a question, give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence.

Before I have you pick up where you left off when exegeting Romans Chapter 13,

I was so eager to dive into this book with you that I forgot to ask you about Every Square Inch Ministries.

If you could explain in more detail that ministry where you are the founder and president.

Every Square Inch Ministries is an outlet, really, for me for the creative work that I do in writing and teaching.

For writing and teaching that I do for myself as opposed to for the

Colson Center or Reflections Ministries or the other groups that I work with. Anytime I do a podcast or whatever, those show up there.

I write a regular newsletter. I have essays that go up there, videos, all of these kinds of things.

It provides me an outlet for teaching. And it's going to increasingly, because of the circumstances in some of the ministries that I do work with, it's going to increasingly be a way that I am going to be making my living as time goes on.

But for now, it is simply, like I said, an outlet for the writing and teaching that I do.

And it's called Every Square Inch because it really is an echo of a quote by Kuiper, who said that there is not a single square inch in the whole domain of human experience over which

Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry out, mine. So the idea here is that literally anything that is within the range of human experience is under Christ's authority.

And this gives me the opportunity to pursue all kinds of different areas, the political that we're talking about here, certainly.

But I've got things on spiritual formation, economics. I've got arts, all kinds of different areas in there.

Yes. And for those of our listeners who are unfamiliar with Abraham Kuiper, he was a great 19th century hero, early 20th century as well, who was a former prime minister of the

Netherlands and a very strong Christian and Reformed Christian. And everybody should know more about Abraham Kuiper.

But if anybody wants more details about Every Square Inch Ministries, go to esquareinch .com,

esquareinch .com, and God willing, we will be repeating that towards the end of the program. Now, going back to Romans 13, you were saying that many people, in your opinion, many

Christians have an overly simplified understanding of this.

And the last thing that you said before we went to the commercial break is that, yes, we are not to be rebels against the government unless, of course, we are commanded, in your opinion,

I believe, to resist government when it is, in essence, demanding that we sin.

And you even went into an example of how, during the COVID crisis, there were government mandates that prohibited people from gathering in their local assembly to worship

God during this time, and yet casinos were open. So if you want to pick up right where you left off.

That's a simple example. Again, the point being that Jesus tells us that we're to give to the government, to give to Caesar what's

Caesar's, but not everything belongs to Caesar. There are things that belong to God.

And we see this even in the early church, where the fundamental confession in the early church is that Jesus is

Lord, and that contrasts with the de facto confession of faith in Rome, which was that Caesar is

Lord. Jesus is Lord is an inescapably political statement, because what it is saying is that government exists under Christ's authority.

And in Rome, that was really the thing that got the Christians in trouble.

Their refusal to acknowledge the emperor's authority, their refusal, well, their refusal to recognize the emperor's supreme authority, their refusal, therefore, to recognize him as a

God, burn a pinch of incense to a statue, that kind of thing, was really the thing that triggered the persecutions more than anything else.

In Rome, the idea of a deity, of a God, God was the supreme being in a particular area of life.

So, for example, the easiest one is Neptune. Neptune is the God of the sea. Anytime you went out on the sea, you would perform a sacrifice to Neptune.

That's a way of acknowledging his authority there and asking him not to take it badly that you're going out on his turf.

Since the emperor is the supreme authority in the political world, that sort of makes him a God. And the way you acknowledge the emperor's authority is you, therefore, do a religious act.

You burn incense to him. In Rome, this is almost like saying the

Pledge of Allegiance, except it is a religious act because of the way they understood gods.

Christians couldn't do that because they're monotheists. There's only one God and we are not going to do a religious act to anyone other than God, the triune

God. They were quite willing to obey the law where they could.

They're quite willing to acknowledge the emperor's authority where they could, but they were not going to acknowledge his supreme authority.

There were limits. And, in fact, you find, you know, the early

Christians would not rebel against the government. They didn't do that. But you do find them, by the fourth century at least, you find them engaging in acts not just of civil disobedience but of active law -breaking.

As a simple example, we find cases where Christians will—

St. Augustine, I believe it is, talks about this. A slave ship ran aground near Hippo, and Christians broke onto the slave ship at night and freed all the slaves.

This was illegal. But Christians were adamantly opposed to the slave trade because of what

Scripture says about the slave trade. Scripture unequivocally condemns the slave trade.

So, they went in and they freed the slaves. That was actually a crime.

That was theft. And yet they would do it because they knew that this was the right thing to do, even breaking the law.

They also engaged in civil disobedience and things like that. Acting in ways that were consistent with Christian principles while generally behaving within the legal structures of the empire.

Now, I need to add at this point that the strict reading of Romans 13 ignores one or two other facts.

When you read Romans 13, when you read 1 Peter, when you read these things that are discussing obedience to the government, it tells us what the government is for.

The government exists to reward the good and punish evil. What happens when government rewards evil and punishes good?

What do we do then? Those passages don't address that question. And yet, that is exactly the situation we all too frequently find ourselves in.

And that ends up being one of the key issues that the church over the centuries had to wrestle with.

And just for the sake of our listeners who may have bought the lies of the leftists who constantly regurgitate that we can't trust the

Bible. In fact, we should have great disdain for the Bible because it promotes slavery.

They are promoting the false idea that the Bible, the

God -breathed words of Scripture are actually promoting chattel slavery, which it does not.

And even to the point that my guest, Dr. Glenn Sunshine, just brought up that the

Bible teaches in opposition to the slavery that we are more familiar with that existed even in this country up until the 19th century.

We read in the Scriptures some very chilling warnings in Exodus chapter 21, verse 16.

Now, one who kidnaps someone, whether he sells them or is found in his possession, shall certainly be put to death.

And, of course, many slaves were kidnapped from their homeland in Africa and then found themselves on the slave trade.

So that's just one example of why we should not believe the lies of leftists in this certain area.

But... Yeah, can I throw in something on this? Oh, sure, sure. So that verse by itself condemns the entire

African, transatlantic African slave trade, period. I mean, and, you know, it seems to me that should be the end of the story.

Slavery in ancient Israel was actually, oddly enough, a form of social welfare, where a poor

Israelite who was, for whatever reason, destitute and actually in danger of starvation, typically, would sell himself or maybe his family as a slave.

The reason they did that is it was then the master's job to feed them. But the provision was that they would then be set free on the seventh year.

And when they were set, they were supposed to be treated well. And when they were set free on the seventh year, they were also supposed to be provided with goods to get them back on their feet.

So it was a way of taking care of them and then sort of resetting things so that they would be able to take care of themselves afterwards.

When you look at the New Testament, where Paul is giving instructions for behaviors of slaves and masters, these are called household codes, where they talk about the responsibilities of members of the household.

In the secular world, there were household codes, but they were always codes that talked about the responsibilities of subordinates to their superiors, never the superiors to the subordinates.

Paul turns that around. It's not just wives' responsibilities to husbands, but husbands to wives. Not just children to parents, but parents to children.

Not just slaves to masters, but masters to slaves. And in the process of doing this, you also get

Paul teaching that in Christ, there are no slaves nor free. We're all one.

Why doesn't Paul explicitly call then for the abolition of slavery?

He certainly hints very strongly to Philemon that he ought to set Onesimus for it.

I think the reason is pure practicality. Rome was a slave -based society, and there had been slave revolts in Rome that the

Romans put down with extreme brutality. Had Paul called for the freeing of slaves at that point, it would have been understood by the

Romans as a call for a slave revolt. And as a matter of fact, many people might have taken it that way themselves and revolted.

Had that happened, it would have not only caused a complete discrediting of Christianity, but it would also have resulted in a lot of people dying very ugly deaths.

That's right. Instead, what you see is the statement that people who engage in the slave trade cannot enter the kingdom of God.

They are under permanent condemnation. As a matter of fact, when you look at the destruction of Babylon in Revelation, where the merchants of the world are lamenting

Babylon, and they're listing all of the things that Babylon did, the ultimate, the capstone of the whole thing is that they were selling the bodies and souls of men.

It leads to that as the point of condemnation. So there is a strong condemnation of the slave trade because a lot of it was based on kidnapping.

Right. But along with that, there is this idea of the spiritual and moral equality of people that sets in motion a set of ideas that it takes time to develop and come to fruition, but the logic of it inevitably leads to the abolition of slavery.

That doesn't come from the secular intellectuals. That doesn't come from your Enlightenment philosophers. That comes from the

Quakers first and the evangelical Christians after. Yes. And as a matter of fact, even in the

Catholic Church, the Catholic Church in Thomas Aquinas concludes that slavery is against natural law and therefore is a sin.

No fewer than four Renaissance popes condemned the slave trade. So this is something that is implicit, not explicit in Scripture.

It takes time to work out the implications of those ideas, but this is where it leads. And to give kudos to our fellow

Reformed brethren of the past, the Covenanter Presbyterians were universally opposed to slavery here in the

United States and were the first Protestant denomination, unless you include the

Quakers as a Protestant denomination, to oppose slavery, even in the

South especially and when it was very unpopular to do so. One of the things that is puzzling about this text that so much of the controversy swirls around amongst

Christians in Romans 13 is the fact that Paul, who is having his amanuensis write things that are

God -breathed here, seems to be addressing a government that every single

Christian would have no problem submitting to. For instance, rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior but for evil.

And that sentence alone makes you scratch your head, but wait a minute, these rulers, especially when you're talking about the

Roman Empire, were the very people that executed Paul for doing good and eventually every apostle was killed except for John.

Every apostle except for John was a martyr. And then of course even in the early centuries of the church you have all kinds of grotesque atrocities committed by this same government towards faithful Christians who were being persecuted for that very thing, doing good.

So can you explain this? It is baffling to me. Romans was written 15 years or so before the persecution started.

Oh, okay. And in general, the principle that he lays out here is government is responsible for maintaining the peace and so on.

That as a general principle is true. But he doesn't address what happens when it goes off the rails.

Which it does do, but that's not what he's talking about in Romans. That's not the context in which he's writing and it's not the situation that he's really addressing.

He's addressing sort of the general situation of what government is supposed to be doing and what governments in general do try to do.

The persecution of Christians isn't going to occur. Like I said,

Romans is written probably in the vicinity of 50, maybe 55.

Persecution doesn't break out until 64, so 10 to 15 years later. Okay.

Well, that helps to bring sense into this that was puzzling me for all my

Christian life, actually. So when we are having this time of friendly or not so friendly dispute with our brothers and sisters in Christ over when we must submit to government authority and when we must resist it, there have been things that have come up, even amongst those who are fellow

Reformed brethren, who say we are to obey the government always unless they are specifically telling us to sin.

Like, for instance, in China, where a family is limited, a couple is limited to how many children they can have.

And I'm not sure if they still enforce that, because I know that they're having some kind of a population problem, even though there are so many...

The population seems to have been exploding ever since they've been in existence, but...

Actually, it's in decline now. India has passed them as the largest country in the world, population -wise.

Where you had people killing their babies, because of what... So you would have

Christians rightly saying, now, we're not to obey that, obviously, but as one famous Christian has said, with whom

I disagreed over this, in fact, he's a friend of mine, who I honor and respect very highly, but he said, if the government tells us to wear purple pinwheels,

I think that's the way he phrased it, above our ears, we are supposed to do that.

Now, I disagreed with that, because I don't think that it's a

God -honoring thing to perpetuate a myth that we know is false, especially when it comes to the health and well -being of our fellow citizens.

Like, for instance, getting vaccinated or wearing masks everywhere, especially when the vaccines were and are experimental, and there are physicians and scientists who warn against taking them.

No, I'm not going to just go along with that. And it's not a good thing, if it's doing some kind of harm, especially to those we know and love, in fact, to ourselves.

So if you want to comment on that. Yeah, well, the minimalist argument on Romans 13 is if the government commands us to do something that Scripture tells us we can't do, or forbids us to do something that Scripture commands us to do, then we have to disobey the government, but otherwise we do obey it.

This is Peter. You tell us whether it's right to obey God rather than man. You know, that's sort of the minimalist argument, and I think everybody agrees on that point.

The question becomes, though, where does it go? Number one, what is it that Scripture commands?

We have in Scripture, do not forsake your own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encourage one another and all the more so as you see the day drawing near.

That's Hebrews 10. If that's the case, then the government tells us to forsake our assembling together.

Are we obligated to obey the government? Let's just start there.

There's a command in Scripture. Okay, so their understanding, now, typically they will say, well, yeah, this is a public health thing.

I don't see a public health exception in Hebrews 10. In fact, could you pick up right on Hebrews 10 when we come back from our midway break now?

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Before I return to my conversation with Dr. Glenn Sunshine and his book

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Send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com and put I need a church in the subject line. That's also the email address where you can send in the question to Dr.

Glenn Sunshine on his book Slaying Leviathan, Limited Government and Resistance in the

Christian Tradition. And before we go to any of our listener questions,

Dr. Sunshine, you were delving into Hebrews chapter 10 before we went to a commercial break, and if you could pick up where you left off.

Excuse me, yes. Well, the, you know, my only, the point that I was making is that the usual argument, the sort of what

I would describe as the minimalist argument in Romans 13 is unless someone is commanding you to do something that is forbidden in Scripture or forbidding you to do something that is commanded in Scripture, you have to obey the government.

But the problem is they don't really pay a lot of attention to things that are, in fact, commanded in Scripture. For example, the command in Hebrews 11 to not forsake the assembling together.

Yet people seem to be quite willing very often to allow the government to tell them to forsake assembling together.

And that it seems to me to be an inconsistency in the argument. But the other point that I would want to make, and this is something that develops over time in the church, is that there are a number of things that are pre -political.

That is to say there are things that existed prior to the development of human government that were in place in the garden.

And the government, because these things exist prior to government, the government does not have legitimate authority over those things.

They are things that were established directly by God, and they have their own spheres of authority.

This, again, is something that Abraham Kuyper talked about. He didn't usually connect it to the garden, but I would argue that his concept is sphere sovereignty, where society is a set of autonomous, that is to say self -governing spheres, of which the government is one.

This is really anchored in the garden. And each of these spheres ought to function without the interference of others.

So government has legitimate authority, but it doesn't have legitimate authority in every area. We already saw that with what

Jesus said. But the family exists prior to the government. The government doesn't have the authority to redefine what a family is.

The government doesn't have authority to, well, education is implicitly there as well.

The government doesn't have the authority to tell the parents how they can or cannot educate their children. Economic production is in place prior to the government.

The government may set up a certain degree of regulations, but they can't stop that. That's not something that government has authority directly over.

There are a number of things like this that are in place prior to the establishment of government. The unalienable rights that we see in Locke are all identified in the

Middle Ages, life, liberty, and property are all things that are identified in the Middle Ages as things that are rights that are granted by God that the government cannot touch arbitrarily.

So all of these things are things that most pastors, most

Christians, most, frankly, theologians today are completely unaware of these long discussions that have taken place among Christian theologians about the nature of rights, about the nature of responsibilities to government and from government, the issue of sphere sovereignty, all of these things that have long been part of Christian political philosophy or Christian political theology.

All of these things have largely been ignored and replaced among conservative

Christians with a very simplistic reading of Romans 13. Okay, we have a listener named

Jesse in La Vista, Nebraska, and Jesse asks, something puzzled me unless I misunderstood you.

I believe you said earlier in the program that the church did not begin resisting government until around the fourth century, but how do you explain that in light of the fact that something

Chris Arnzen, the host, brought up is true, that every apostle was martyred except for John?

Okay, when I say resist the government, what I meant in that context was doing things beyond civil disobedience.

Okay, the definition of civil disobedience is you disobey the law and accept the consequences of that.

Martyrdom falls in that category. In the case that I was citing in the latter fourth century, you're seeing

Christians who are not just engaging in passive resistance or civil disobedience, they're actually engaging in a form of active resistance where they are actively going out and breaking the law, not in a form of civil disobedience, but actively, like I said, in this case, freeing slaves, which is technically by Roman law theft.

You don't see earlier than that, you don't see Christians doing that sort of thing. They will disobey the law where necessary, but they will then simply accept the consequences of it.

They're not simply going out and finding things that are wrongs in society and going out and deliberately breaking the law and going after those things in a more active, aggressive way.

You see that emerging later. Okay, thank you, Jesse, and please make sure you give us your full mailing address in La Vista, Nebraska, because guess what?

You've just won a free copy of Slaying Leviathan, compliments of Canon Press, and also compliments of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CVBBS .com.

We'll actually be the ones that ship the book out to you absolutely free of charge.

And please let me know if you're a first -time questioner or not, because all first -time questioners also receive a free brand -new

New American Standard Bible, compliments of NASBible .com,

who publish this program. Thank you very much, Jesse. Let's see here.

We have a listener in East Massapequa, Long Island, New York, Todd, and Todd wants to know, can you cite some insights from both those in the patristic era and during the

Protestant Reformation who have very clear and valuable exegesis of the

Scripture regarding resistance of government? Well, I know that you have a whole chapter on Augustine, don't you?

Yeah, I've got a chapter on Augustine in the book. In terms of resistance, probably the best person that you, the first person you have to go to in a very direct way is going to be

Luther. In a virtually unknown piece that he did called the

Torgau Memorandum, Luther lays out an argument for resistance to government led by what become known as the lesser magistrates.

The idea here, I'm not going to go through the whole history, but the idea here is that the governing powers that are talked about in Romans, it doesn't only include the emperor.

It includes all of the magistrates that are under the emperor. And so, in a situation where the emperor does something illegal or wrong, breaks his word, something along those lines, the governing officials below him have the authority to resist him.

In American terms, this would be something like a governor saying, I am not going to follow a presidential decree, or a sheriff saying,

I am not going to enforce this particular mandate by the governor or by the federal government.

I'm not going to enforce a particular rule about guns, for example.

This would be an example of resistance by the lesser magistrate. That idea is really pioneered by Luther in this thing called the

Torgau Memorandum. And it forms the foundation then for most of what becomes known as Protestant resistance theory from that point on.

The exception is in England, where for different reasons, resistance, a number of thinkers say resistance doesn't have to be led by the lesser magistrate.

It can be led actually by the people in general. And the reason for that has to do with covenantal ideas of government, which if we need to,

I can explain how that works. But for the moment, in terms of resistance, it's Luther and the Torgau Memorandum that are really critical to get it off the ground.

By the way, have you read and are you familiar with Matt Trujillo's very valuable work,

The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates? Yes, I am familiar with the book.

And it's a good summary of where that, of that doctrine as it is held primarily on continental

Europe. When you get in, like I said, when you get into the British Isles, they take it in a bit of a different direction.

Largely because they understand government in a much more strongly covenantal form.

And what happens when you get the idea of government, all right, Calvin is the usual person that is cited for this.

Calvin notes that in Exodus, when God sets himself up as ruler over Israel, when he establishes

Israel as his people, as a nation, he asks them three separate times, do you agree to abide by the terms of the covenant?

They agree all three times. At that point, he ratifies a covenant with them. And you know from elsewhere, he describes himself as king over Israel.

So when the people want a human king, God says to Samuel, they're not rejecting you, they're rejecting me as king over Israel.

Okay, so the idea here is that when God establishes his government over Israel, he does it via covenant.

If God himself establishes government via covenant, then all government should be established via covenant.

Okay, so the government that exists is a covenant between the ruler and the ruled, between the king and the people.

Now in England, where this goes is, now like I said, in continental Europe, resistance against government has to be led by lesser magistrates.

In England and Scotland, a number of theologians say, well wait a minute, if the covenant is between the king and the people, then if the king breaks his word, he's breaking his word to the people.

If the king violates the covenant, the people are the wrong party, so they then have the right to resist the king.

We don't need the lesser magistrates. And this is what's going to eventually lead to lock in Jefferson.

Well, thank you Todd, and by the way, please give us your full mailing address in East Massapequa because you've also won

Slaying Leviathan, compliments of Canon Press and compliments of CVBBS .com,

Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, who will be shipping that book out to you. We also have

Jean Mark, or Jean Mark, in River Ridge, Louisiana.

And he is asking a question that would take us about three weeks to answer fully, but the question is,

I would love to hear your guests' views of libertarianism, theonomy, and traditional

Republican conservatism. Wow.

Okay. Libertarianism has got its strengths, but it runs,

I think, into a problem in that it tends to overshoot in that we have restraints on our behavior on the basis of divine and natural law that typical libertarians do not recognize.

So many libertarians, for example, are perfectly fine with so -called gay marriage and such because that's a libertarian issue.

As far as they're concerned, it's an issue of liberty. The problem is that the definition historically of liberty is the freedom to act, to make decisions, and to act within the boundaries set by divine and natural law.

And same -sex marriage does not fall within divine and natural law. The alternative to liberty is what's called license.

License is freedom from restraint. It's freedom from any constraints on behavior.

Your libertarians who argue against or who argue in favor of removing constraints on same -sex, so -called same -sex marriage or abortion or any of these other things are actually not arguing for liberty in the traditional understanding of the word.

They're arguing for license. They're arguing for acting outside the boundaries that are established by divine and natural law.

So I think while I'm sympathetic with a lot of what the libertarians have to say, I think that they miss the mark there in some pretty significant ways because of their lack of understanding of what liberty traditionally, historically means.

Okay. Theonomy. In a lot of ways, I think theonomy also, depending on what you mean by the term, can overshoot the mark.

I think the laws that God established for ancient Israel were for ancient Israel. But there is a reason why they no longer apply directly to us today because the covenant that God made with Israel, when you reach the new covenant period, it is no longer a covenant with a nation.

It is a covenant with an international people. People from all tribes and kindreds and nations and tongues.

The gospel has now gone international. The covenant is now international. And as a result, a national law no longer applies in the same way.

That being said, the principles that governed the law in the

Old Testament. The Old Testament law is founded on a basic set of moral principles, natural law and divine law, if you will.

It's founded on these moral principles. And if we discern what those moral principles are, these are the things that should guide our law.

It should not be based, I don't believe, it should be based directly on the law of the Old Testament. But we need to look behind the laws of the

Old Testament to find the guiding principles that were embodied for the culture at the time of Israel.

If we understand what those principles are and embody them, that, I think, is the way laws should be made.

If that makes me a theonomist, by some definitions, that may make me a theonomist, but by other definitions, not so much.

So that would be my answer for theonomy. And as far as traditional republicanism goes,

I'm not sure which traditional republican you're talking about, because there are at least several different types of conservatism in America.

You've got economic conservatism. You've got social conservatism. The two don't always get along very well together historically.

Reagan managed to pull them together. I'm not sure that they still hold together very well.

So I'm not entirely sure how to answer that one. Yeah. And obviously you have isolationists who are republicans and war hawks who are republicans.

In fact, all three of those categories our listener mentioned, none of them are monolithic. Right. And libertarians,

I know a number of Christian libertarians who did not vote for their candidate, the party, the libertarian party's candidate for president.

I believe it was the last election because the man was actually in favor of gun control, which is oxymoronic when it comes to libertarianism.

And of course they disagree on a whole host of things. Even Christian libertarians disagree on the rigidness versus the looseness of border control.

Some don't even believe we should have border control at all. So there's a whole host of things like that.

Right. And so I picked single examples of each because I don't know how to cover the entire range.

Right. Yeah. Especially since we don't have three weeks, like I mentioned. Well, I'm going to ask a follow -up question from Brian in Rochester, New York, who says, since the previous questioner didn't mention this,

I'm going to throw in Christian nationalism. Another one that may take a week to answer.

Yeah. Christian nationalism is a term that is so ill -defined that I'm not entirely, again,

I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. As it is used in the media and by the left, it's anybody who says that Christianity should have anything to do with our laws.

And if that's the case, I'm a Christian nationalist. But other people have a much more extreme view of what

Christian nationalism is, a much more precise view than that.

What I would say is that, okay, if we believe that God loves us and wants the best for us, and if we believe that God also knows what's best for us, then it seems to me that out of love of neighbor, we ought to be working to bring

God's standards to bear in every area of life. And that also includes in the political realm.

We should be seeking legislation that reflects God's truth because that is what will be best for society, that will be best for our neighbor, that will produce the best results.

And it's interesting. Somebody that I interviewed recently is some form of a

Christian nationalist, although that was not the topic of our discussion. And a listener was complaining that I was interviewing this person because he is a

Christian nationalist, and he said that is nothing but pagan ideology and heresy.

And I said to him that Christian nationalism is not a monolith.

There's a wide spectrum of people who are very different from one another who identify themselves as a

Christian nationalist. And I said, let me give you an example of Zambia, the nation on the

African continent that officially declares and defines itself as a

Christian nation. Do you want them to renounce that? Do you want them to make some kind of official public declaration that they are no longer a

Christian nation? Would that make you feel better? I don't even understand that concept. Well, let me add one other thing.

And this, by the way, brings up something else that I had wanted to bring up earlier. The other problem that we have when we're comparing ourselves with the early church, the

New Testament church, early centuries of the church, even the medieval church and the present, is we live in a representative republic.

And that means that we are in a very, very different context from where they are.

And therefore, the political options we have available to us and the legal options we have available to us are radically different from what they had then.

And I would say our responsibilities, therefore, politically are radically different from what they had then. And what that means in the context of Christian nationalism, every group in America has the right to advocate for their values, for their priorities, to lobby for what they want the legislation to look like, to vote for their candidates, to support their candidates, to do all of those kinds of things.

Why should Christians be any different? Right. You know, the people who complain about Christian nationalism will allow every other group to do that.

Why are we the ones that can't? Right. Let's see here.

We have either Stephan or Stephen, because I know there's two pronunciations with the

P -H, and Stephan or Stephen asks, oh, and he's in Salmon Creek, Washington.

There are some Christians, and I know that they are a minority, and they would be primarily folks from Great Britain, but they believe that it was a sin for the colonists to rebel against the

English government, which led to an independent nation. What are your ways of explaining your side of this?

Well, actually, they're not just across the pond. My pastor falls in that category, too, oddly enough.

Yep, yep, yep. But, okay, we have to go back to the idea of what are the limits that God has placed on government.

Are there certain, you know, is the idea of unalienable rights actually biblical?

Are there rights that are pre -political, that predate government, and that are therefore not subject to the authority of government, at least arbitrarily?

So, for example, we have the right to life. The government cannot arbitrarily take life, okay?

Capital punishment is still authorized in the Old Testament, certainly, but it's not arbitrary, and there are specific rules and procedures that are in place to safeguard that.

But otherwise, the right to life is sacrosanct, and it cannot arbitrarily be removed.

Right to property is the same way. It's worth noting that Ahab, the evil king in Israel, the thing that actually leads to his unalterable condemnation by Elijah is when he steals, he murders and steals a vineyard from Nabal.

It's the taking of the property as well as the... He's murdered a lot of people before this, but it's the taking of the property that is actually one of the key things that leads to his utter condemnation.

Right to property is there. Government can collect taxes for their legitimate purposes. They cannot confiscate property arbitrarily.

Liberty, again, you have the... People have the right to liberty to act within the boundaries set by divine and natural law.

Government cannot take away people's liberty. They cannot enslave people, for example. That is a boundary that the government is not allowed to transgress.

Okay, so here's the question. Did the government in England transgress these areas?

Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence makes a good case that they did, and if, in fact, he's right, then it seems to me by the development that had taken place by this point in Christian political theory, the revolution was justified.

Yeah, and it's interesting being from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where the nation's oldest college exists,

Dickinson College, was named after John Dickinson, who was John Adams' primary opponent in the starting of the

American Revolution. I believe he later came around, though, and was a part of the

Declaration of Independence in some fashion. If I remember right, he was opposed to the

Declaration of Independence, but he actually fought on the side of the colonists, you know, he was a patriot, but he didn't really want to,

I don't think he was a signatory, but he certainly fought against it during the

Continental Congress. Yes, yeah, and it was, I think it was more of a matter of, not that he was totally opposed to independence, but that he thought it was too soon to quickly approach that end safely.

Yeah, yeah, I don't remember the details, but that's just sort of the, my memory of him sort of floats around that sort of general idea.

We have to go to our final break, don't go away, we're going to be right back after these messages. I'm Dr.

Tony Costa, Professor of Apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary. I'm thrilled to introduce to you a church where I've been invited to speak and have grown to love,

Hope Reform Baptist Church in Corham, Long Island, New York, pastored by Rich Jansen and Christopher McDowell.

It's such a joy to witness and experience fellowship with people of God like the dear saints at Hope Reform Baptist Church in Corham, who have an intensely passionate desire to continue digging deeper and deeper into the unfathomable riches of Christ in His Holy Word, and to enthusiastically proclaim

Christ Jesus the King and His doctrines of sovereign grace in Suffolk County, Long Island and beyond.

I hope you also have the privilege of discovering this precious congregation and receive the blessing of being showered by their love as I have.

For more information on Hope Reform Baptist Church, go to hopereformedli .net

That's hopereformedli .net or call 631 -696 -5711.

That's 631 -696 -5711. Tell the folks at Hope Reform Baptist Church of Corham, Long Island, New York that you heard about them from Tony Costa on Iron Sharpens Iron.

O hail the power of Jesus' name

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Our congregation is one of a growing number of churches who love and support Iron Sharpens Iron radio financially.

Grace Church at Franklin is an independent, autonomous body of believers which strives to clearly declare the whole counsel of God as revealed in Scripture through the person and work of our

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This is Pastor Bill Sousa wishing you all the richest blessings of our sovereign

Lord, God, Savior, and King Jesus Christ today and always.

Grace Covenant Baptist Church Chris Arnzen here, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

I strongly recommend a church I've been recommending as far back as the 1980s, Grace Covenant Baptist Church in Flemington, New Jersey, pastored by Alan Dunn.

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They believe churches need to turn to the Bible to discover what to include in worship and how to worship

God in spirit and truth. They endeavor to maintain a God -centered focus and to protect worship from the intrusion of carnal entertainments and distractions.

Reading, preaching, and hearing the Word of God, singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, baptism, and communion are the scriptural elements of their corporate worship performed with faith, joy, and sobriety.

Discover more about Grace Covenant Baptist Church in Flemington, New Jersey at gcbc -nj .org

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Here's Joe Riley, a listener in Ireland who wants you to know about a guest on the show he really loves hearing interviewed,

Dr. Joe Moorcraft. I'm Joe Riley, a faithful Iron Sharpens Iron Radio listener here in Atai in County Kildare, Ireland.

Going back to 2005, one of my very favorite guests on Iron Sharpens Iron is

Dr. Joe Moorcraft. If you've been blessed by Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr. Moorcraft and Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia are largely to thank since they are one of the program's largest financial supporters.

Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming is in Forsyth County, a part of the Atlanta metropolitan area.

Heritage is a thoroughly biblical church unwaveringly committed to Westminster standards and Dr.

Joe Moorcraft is the author of an eight -volume commentary on the larger catechism. Heritage is a member of the

Hanover Presbytery built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone and tracing its roots and heritage back to the great

Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. Heritage maintains and follows the biblical truth and principles proclaimed by the reformers.

Scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone, and God's glory alone. Their primary goal is the worship of the

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If you visit, tell them Joe O 'Reilly, an Iron Sharpens Iron Radio listener I'm Pastor Keith Allen of Lindbrook Baptist Church, a

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But today, I want to introduce you to my senior pastor, Doug McMasters of New High Park Baptist Church on Long Island.

Doug McMasters here, former director of pastoral correspondence at Grace to You, the radio ministry of John MacArthur.

In the film Chariots of Fire, Olympic gold medalist runner Eric Liddell remarked that he felt

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I sensed that same God -given pleasure when ministering the word and helping others gain a deeper knowledge and love for God.

That love starts with the wonderful news that the Lord Jesus Christ is a savior who died for sinners and that God forgives all who come to him in repentance, trusting solely in Christ to deliver them.

I would be delighted to have the honor and privilege of ministering to you if you live in the Long Island area or Queens or Brooklyn or the

Bronx in New York City. For details on New High Park Baptist Church, visit nhpbc .com.

That's nhpbc .com. You can also call us at 516 -352 -9672.

That's 516 -352 -9672. That's New High Park Baptist Church, a congregation in love with each other, passionate for Christ, committed to learning and being shaped by God's word and delighting in the gospel of God's sovereign grace.

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I already know I want him back as often as he wants to return to this program. I've been so fascinated by his brilliance and I hope that he will agree to come back as often as I want him to.

We do have a listener in Spanish Fork, Utah.

His name is Lemuel. And Lemuel asks, Is there really the criminality connected to what occurred on January 6th, which has been called an insurrection, especially by leftists but even some

Republicans, as the media would claim? If it were an insurrection, it would be the most absolutely incompetent insurrection in history.

You have a bunch of people who are essentially unarmed. There are no guns or anything like that present.

Many of them are older people. No military training, nothing like that.

This is not an insurrection in any meaningful sense of the word. And in fact, when the FBI first looked into it, they concluded it wasn't an insurrection and it only became an insurrection when the

Democrats in Congress insisted on calling it that. So no, it was not an insurrection.

A lot of what has come out about this indicates that it was a political stunt.

The so -called hearings that were done by the Democrats, there's plenty of evidence that's come out that they were suppressing evidence, they were suppressing testimony, all kinds of things like that.

Effectively, what you have there is a grand jury, which is only getting one side of the story, except grand juries are always done in secret.

They're never done publicly. The Democrats put it on the news. And again, there is just a massive amount of things that were not made public that have only come out since.

The whole thing looks to me, frankly, like quite a bit of a put -up job. And even if it weren't, what is happening is a classic case of lawfare rather than anything serious.

No, I don't think it qualifies as an insurrection in any meaningful sense of the word at all.

And like I said, it is supremely, if it were an insurrection, it's supremely incompetent and it would deserve laughter rather than any kind of serious consideration if that's what it actually was.

Well, going to the opposite extreme, was there anything, in your opinion, in the realm of resistance in the

Christian tradition where that was an acceptable form of legitimate resistance?

Well, I think that what started off as a, you know, it started off as a protest, which

I think as long as it was done peacefully would have been perfectly appropriate. There is,

I've seen enough evidence that suggests it's quite possible that the police provoked a lot of what happened.

The fact that people have testified that the doors to the Capitol were opened and the

Capitol Police were allowing people to walk in and those people were then later arrested, all of that suggests that there's a lot of things that happened that were a setup.

People going into the Capitol when the police opened the doors for them is not a protest, that's not resistance, that's sightseeing.

That's right. Having said that, there was violence that took place and I don't think that was justified.

And in fact, the only person that was actually murdered was a woman, a veteran, a female veteran who was shot by a police officer and she was unarmed and doing nothing to provoke such an action.

She was going in through a window and in every other instance where a police officer has shot someone, this has been investigated very deeply and thoroughly and if that person was unarmed and posed no immediate threat, the officer has been disciplined or often frequently charged, except in this case he got a commendation, if I remember right.

Right, and there was a police officer who I believe perished from a heart attack.

Yeah, but that was a day or two later, if I remember right. I have to check. You know, so yeah,

I really, you know, I don't want to fall into the category of a conspiracy theorist, but there's a lot of things about this whole thing that just sort of smell bad.

You know, I have to be clear here, where there was violence on the part of the

January 6th protesters, that was wrong and those things ought to be pursued.

There may be serious criminal cases in those instances, but there is an awful lot of stuff that has been tried that was for nonviolent offenses.

There are people who didn't even go into the Capitol who have been arrested. There are all kinds of things that are going on.

This has been anti -republic stuff. Right, well, I want you in two minutes to summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today.

Give to Caesar what's Caesar's and give to God what's God's. Always, you know, as we are looking at a situation where government is increasingly expanding its reach, where government is turning into Leviathan, it is extending its tentacles into every area of life, keep asking yourself, is this something that is a legitimate area for the government to be entering?

Is this a legitimate part of government's calling? And if it isn't, do what you can to resist.

And in a republic, resistance does not necessarily mean, actually, it should not mean taking up arms.

There's a whole raft of things that we can do before we even begin to think of things like that.

There's running for office yourself. There's lobbying. There's letters. There's ultimately, you know, if these sort of standard approaches don't work, you can move up to public protests.

I like what occurs in Moscow, Idaho. When they do a protest, they call a psalm sing, where people will go out and sing psalms as a form of protest.

You can move from there, if needed, to levels of civil disobedience. But there's a whole lot of things that we can do along the way to resist, to protest, to object to the government extending its reach into areas where it doesn't belong.

And I would encourage us to take this very seriously and start doing it. Now, how do people listen to your

Pugcast, as you call it? Okay, the Theology Pugcast is available on pretty much any podcast app.

Pretty much anywhere where you get podcasts, you'll be able to find it. It's actually a pretty large podcast.

By this point, we're getting 15 ,000 downloads in 60 countries every week. So it's pretty easy to find.

And again, it's Theology Pugcast, P -U -G -cast. We started off in a pub called the

Corner Pug. That's where the name came from. So you've got that.

And if you want to pick up some more of my stuff, you know, in terms of podcasts and things like that that I've done, you can go to my website,

Every Square Inch Ministries. It's esquareinch .org or .com. Either one will get you there.

Great. And please say hello to my friend C .R. Wiley, who I've had on this program and love interviewing as well.

I'll pass on your greeting. Yep. Well, I also want to thank, once again, Canon Press, who provided us a limited number of copies of Slaying Leviathan to give away to our listeners today.

If you want to find out more about this book and other books published by Canon Press, go to canonpress .com.

And I want to thank everybody who listened, especially those who took the time to write in questions. And I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater