Unwilling to work for reformation of the present deformed social order, many people, especially students, are resorting to civil disobedience and violence. The present wave of demonstrations and street riots sweeping the Western world is justified by those taking part in them on the grounds that an individual or a group is entitled to disobey the laws of the land if he believes them to be unjust. In support of their argument they quote with approval Henry Thoreau’s essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. Thoreau had written his essay after being imprisoned in Concord jail for refusal to pay his taxes because he objected to the Mexican War. The war, to Thoreau, was a hateful thing—stupid and unjust, waged for the extension of the obscene system of Negro slavery. Under the stress of his experience in prison Thoreau was driven to examine the whole theory of the relation of the individual to the state. As a man who would not compromise with his conscience, he reacted to the government’s resort to coercion over him by applying the counter principle of passive resistance and civil disobedience. In the event of a clash between political expediency and the higher moral law, Thoreau argued that it is the duty of the individual citizen to obey his conscience rather than the state. He went even further, and asserted the doctrine of the individual contract, which in turn implied the doctrine of individual nullification: “No government,” he said, “can have any pure right over my person or property but what I concede to it…. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right.” According to Thoreau, the individual is the source of all moral, legal, and political obligation in society, from which all civil power and authority are derived.1
For Martin Luther King, civil disobedience meant the same thing. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” published in his book, Why We Can’t Wait, King wrote: “One may well ask, ‘How can you advocate breaking some of the laws and obeying others?’ I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws…. A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.”2
For King a good end may justify the resort to evil means. “It is right to break laws if we think that they are unfair and can get publicity for a good cause by doing so.” Upon this basis King advocated disobedience of the segregation ordinances of various American states. Because they are morally wrong they should not be obeyed. In pursuit of this policy King met his tragic death, thereby proving that civil disobedience invites a counter appeal to force, and if indulged in by everyone will soon reduce society to anarchy. While approving of King’s great personal courage and his Christian stand for justice, we must reject his appeal to violence. The means one adopts to achieve a given end will always determine the nature of the end achieved. King allowed himself to be used by groups in society who exploited him for their own evil ends. Let his terrible fate be a warning from the Lord not to follow his example of playing with fire from hell. At the same time, let us continue the struggle for justice in race relations for which he ,gave his life, using more Christ-like methods to attain the same end for which he struggled. It is for reformation of society that we must work, not for revolution.
Power and Authority
Ever since the French Revolution proclaimed the revolutionary doctrine of popular sovereignty instead of God’s sovereignty summed lip in the confession “no God no master,” the crucial distinction between power and authority has been blurred or lost. Frightful tensions and rifts in society are bound to develop whenever the state or the general will of the majority or the party claims to he sovereign, that is, the source of both authority and power in society. Authority over men can be vested only in Almighty God, who allocates to the various separate spheres of society their own respective functions of power. All governmental authority has a divine and not a human origin which alone can keep it within bounds. What is true of governmental authority is also true of all other kinds of authority.
The police do not have authority because they carry weapons of self-defense, but because they exist to uphold the majesty of the law and maintain peace and order in society. The father does not have authority because he is bigger than his child, but because God has appointed him to that office in creation. Nor does the teacher exercise authority over his pupils because he is stronger than they, but because he acts in the place of the parents when they are at school. The authority of the government over its citizens, of parents over their children, of employers over their workers, is directly derived in each case from God alone. As the Lord told Moses from the midst of the bush that burned but was not consumed, “I AM THAT I AM” (Exod. 3:14), the source of all that exists outside himself. Apart from him nothing could exist.
As sovereign Lord of his own creation the Lord God has only delegated to each sphere of society the authority necessary for it to carry out its own proper function. Thus God has delegated some of his authority to husbands and commanded that wives must obey them (Eph. 5:22). He has also delegated some of his authority to parents and commanded children to obey them (Exod. 20:12; Eph. 6:1).
Civil Authority Originates with God
Likewise, God has delegated to the state the power of the sword of justice so that it may restrain the evil doer. For this reason Paul teaches in the Epistle to the Romans, “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God” (Rom. 13:1). In other words, all civil authority has its origin in God, whether it realizes the fact or not. Of the state Dooyeweerd writes:
In the divine structural principle of this societal relationship the power of the sword is unbreakably bound up with the typical end-function of the state, that is, the maintenance of a public jural community of rulers and subjects. All the intrinsic matters of state ought to be directed by this juridical function… A state where the power of the sword becomes an end in itself degenerates into an organized band of highwaymen, as Augustine and Calvin remarked.
A public community of law which, as end function, qualifies the state, is utterly different from the internal jural community of other societal relationships, such as family, school or church. In all of these the internal rural community is directed by the peculiar end function of the relationship concerned…
Only in the case of the state does the jural community function as the end function, but always founded upon the territorial organization of the power of the sword. The internal community of law of the stale is a community of jural government, where the government, as servant of God, does not carry the sword in vain. The government may, in accordance with the state’s inner law of life, never allow itself to be led by any other point of reference than that of justice. But here is no talk of a private community of law, as in other societal relationships, but a public one, subject to the jural principle of the common good. And exactly here, in the understanding of the principle of the common good the difference between Christian and pagan or humanistic ideas of the stale becomes clearly evident.3
Dooyeweerd then explains in The Christian Idea of the State that this difference between the Christian and the apostale humanist idea of the state lies in the fact that the former Christian idea “has principally broken with any absolutization of either state or individual. It alone can grasp the principle of the common good as a truly jural principle of public law because it is grounded in the confession of a supra-temporal root-community of humanity in the kingdom of Jesus Christ, and because it accepts therefore the principle of sphere-sovereignty for the temporal societal bonds.”4
It is the state as limited by God’s absolute sovereignty and not to the totalitarian state of modern society that the Christian is to be obedient. Since the authority of such a limited state is derived from God and not from the will of the majority or the will of the party, God demands that we respect and obey its officers.
In this matter of obedience to governments, Peter says: “Be subject to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake, whether to the king as supreme or unto governors, as sent by him” (I Peter 2:13–14). Civil obedience to the limited state under God is thus a fundamental moral obligation laid upon every citizen of the land, and to disobey the civil authority is to disobey God. The civil authorities are “holy servants” of God whether they believe in God or not, since they have been instituted to hold in check man’s sinful tendencies. In terms of this plain teaching of Scripture, civil disobedience is revealed as a policy of the anti-Christ. Without obedience to the law-enforcing functions of government, society must inevitably collapse. For God’s Word that which defines the anti-christ, the man of sin, the godless man is precisely his will to live without any law at all (II Thess. 2:3–8).
A Time to Disobey
Yet the Bible itself also teaches that there is a time to disobey the government. The divine right of kings and rulers is always qualified by that divine right to the obedience of men’s hearts which is unlimited, final, and absolute. In the last analysis we must always obey God rather than the government. parental, or economic authority when it commands us to sin. As Peter says, “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).
For example, if a drunken father tried to force his son to sin, then it would be the child’s duty to disobey. Or if the government commands the Christian to sin, he must refuse to obey.
When Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego were commanded by King Nebuchadnezzar to fall down and worship the golden image they rightly refused. With marvelous courage they told the king, “Be it known unto thee that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set” (Dan. 3:18). As a result they were cast into the fiery furnace, from which God miraculously delivered them.
How terrifying is such power to the mere individual. It is usually arrayed in terrifying conformity, as in Babylon of old. All have to think the same thoughts and to act in the same way most favorable to the dictator of the day. Thus in the days of King Nebuchadnezzar, all the princes, the governors, the captains, the judges, the treasurers, and the counselors had to conform; all except three young men who refused to fall down and worship the golden image.
In this clash between the powers of heaven and earth it is obvious that the earthly king had no idea of power except that of brute force. He, knowing his strength in this direction, found it most disturbing that there should be anyone who would attempt to resist him. This was a new experience for King Nebuchadnezzar. He could not believe his ears when it was reported to him. When finally he did understand he could not conceal the rage that welled up within him. Such opposition could not be tolerated. It must be crushed, burnt out, and destroyed.
Even so have the mighty spoken throughout all history. In a fit of rage the emperor Nero burnt thousands of Christians in the gardens of his palace. Ivan the Terrible murdered whole families to gratify his rage.
An Obligation to Resist
John Calvin made resistance to unjust princes not only permissible but an absolute obligation, but only when undertaken by duly constituted representatives of the people. While deprecating in the strongest terms the right of resistance on the part of “private persons,” he exhorted municipal authorities, estates-general, and parliaments to call rulers to account as part of their vocation as God’s magistrates. In some countries or states, he taught, there have existed magistrates specially instituted to restrain the doings of the chief magistrate. Such were certain officials of Athens, Sparta, and Rome. and such, he declared, “are possibly, nowadays, in each kingdom the three estates assembled.”5 It would, by hypothesis, be lawful for such magistrates to resist tyrannical action and, therefore, it would be their duty to do so. Failing to do so they would betray the liberty of their people.
In a letter to the French Huguenot leader, Coligny, written in 1561, Calvin applied this principle of the duty of resistance on the part of “minor magistrates” such as members of Estates-General. He had, he said, been asked beforehand, whether in view of the oppression of the “children of God” in France, active resistance would not be justified. He had answered, he declared, that it were better that all the said children of God should perish rather than that the Gospel should be dishonored by bloodshed. But he had added that if the Princes of the blood took action to maintain their legal rights and if the Parlements of France joined with them, then indeed all good subjects might lawfully aid them in arms, in defense of their legal rights, even against the legitimate sovereign.6 This doctrine was suited to the special needs of the Huguenots. Though they were only a minority in France and could not hope to control the Estates-Ceneral, many of them were noblemen or wealthy merchants, who held the chief magistracies and controlled the highest courts of their own provinces. Calvin’s doctrine of active resistance by lesser magistrates to the sovereign or supreme magistrate justified their using their local privileges in defense of their faith. John Plamenatz in Man and Society comments on this doctrine as follows:
Calvin’s doctrine, slightly altered to meet the needs of the Huguenots, was at bottom only the medieval theory of resistance, as we find it in Aquinas, which asserts, not a right of individual or even popular resistance, but a right of official or privileged resistance. According to this theory, only those who already have authority have the right to resist authority. The mere citizen or subject has no such right.7
John Knox vs. Bloody Mary
The first important group of political Christians to oppose absolutism were the British refugees from the persecution of Bloody Mary in the 1550’s. John Knox, Bishop Ponet, and Goodman, in particular, fled to the Continent and from there urged resistance and the deposition of England’s queen. They justified Wyatt’s Rebellion against Mary on both biblical and constitutional grounds, appealing to the compact between ruler and people in natural law. The Geneva Bible, with its annotations, was to disseminate these ideas widely in England. Calvin himself rather guardedly followed the current, trying to moderate the more turbulent. Goodman reported that Calvin had censured his How Superior Powers Ought to Be Obeyed as “somewhat harsh” to rulers, but nevertheless essentially true. And in the year in which Knox left to take part in the revolution in Scotland, Calvin brought out the last edition of the Institutes with the famous paragraph inculcating the duty of resistance on the part of “minor magistrates.” The decade closed with declarations of constitutional rights against tyrants by the Scots Assembly and a group of the French Reformed. In the First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, John Knox declared it was the duty of the English people to depose Mary Tudor, who was persecuting the true faith. Though her title to the throne might be good by English law, that law stood for nothing against the authority of Scripture.
In terms of this Reformed doctrine of the right to resist tyranny the lesser magistrates of the Netherlands in 1581 deposed Phi lip of Spain on the grounds of a broken contract in natural law and justice. Philip’s attempt, through Cardinal Granvelle and the Duke of Alba, to reduce the Low Countries to the status of a Spanish province met with determined opposition among all classes of society, Roman Catholics and Protestants alike. And no wonder. The number of those who were put to death for their Reformed faith in the Netherlands alone, during the reign of Charles V, has been estimated by Sarpi in his History of the Council of Trent as 50,000, while Grotius put it at 100,000. At least half as many perished under King Philip II. Motley points out in The Rise of the Dutch Republic:
Upon the 16th of Feb. 1568, a sentence of the Holy Office condemned all the inhabitants of the Netherlands to death as heretics. From this universal doom only a few persons especially named were excepted. A proclamation of the king dated ten days later, confirmed this decree of the Inquisition and ordered it to be carried into instant execution. Three millions of people, men, women and children, were sentenced to death in three lines.8
Calvinism the Model in Europe
The Calvinist federalism or pluralism of the consequent United Provinces became the working model of free institutions to seventeenth century Europe. Neville Figgis points out in From Gerson to Grotius the Dutch republic became the pioneer of liberty in modern as distinct from medieval Europe. Tn the age of the Roman and Anglican absolutists, Richelieu, Bousset, and Laud, the Dutch jurist Althusius stood out as the great representative Reformed political theorist, who built a rounded political system uniting popular sovereignty with the medieval Christian principles of the inherent and inalienable natural rights of communities within the state. The social community, as it existed in the thought of Althusius, is a community of communities, an assemblage of morally integrated lesser associations and groups. Its unity does not result from being permeated with sovereign law, extending from the top through all individual components of the structure. Of the profound significance of Althusius’ contribution to political and social theory Dooyeweerd writes: It is no accident that it was a Calvinistic thinker who broke with the universalistic conception of the State in a period in which Bodin’s concept of sovereignty had introduced a new version of this universalistic view. In opposition to the entire medieval-Aristotelian tradition Althusius gave evidence of taking account of the internal structural principles of society in his theory of human symbiosis.
It was the famous jurist, Johannes Althusius, in his Politica, who made the following remark: “I do not call ‘members of the State,’ or of the universal symbiotic community, the separate single human beings, or the families, nor even the colleges according to their being constituted in a particular private and public association, but a number of provinces and districts agreeing to form one whole by mutual conjunction and communication.”
The foundation of this view, which clearly contradicted the Aristotelian teleological conception of the State’s parts, is to be found in the first chapter of his work. Here he summarized his anti-universalistic standpoint with respect to the inter-structural relation between the different types of social relationships as follows: “Every type of social relationships has its proper laws peculiar to it, whereby it is ruled. And these Jaws are different and divergent in each kind of social relationship. according to the requirement of the inner nature of each of them.” This utterance may be considered the first modern formulation of the principle of internal sphere-sovereignty in the societal relationships.9
Reformation, not Revolution
Summing up, we may claim that legal wrongs must be redressed by legal means. In an “open society” resort must always be made to reasoned discussion of grievances. Such legal processes may be slow, but they arc still available, and any attempt to by-pass them only creates contempt for law, and, if pushed to excess, can bring about the collapse of society itself when all rights would go by the board. The present type of civil disobedience is a far cry from the right to resist tyranny of the lesser magistrates taught by our great Reformed forebears.
The real answer to the terrible problems now facing America is not revolution by an appeal to the guns of men but reformation by the Word of God. Let Christians work to elect men into the lesser and higher offices of government who will abide by God’s great ordinances for human society, especially the great principle of sphere sovereignty. The answer to the growing bureaucratization and centralization of power in all Western states is not civil disobedience but associative pluralism which will restore to the various spheres of society their divinely given power and authority to carry out the tasks for which they were created by God himself.
Unless the nations return to obedience to God’s structural principles and norms for society in all spheres they too will undergo his judgment just as the Roman; Babylonian, and Egyptian empires did in the past. It is by obedience to God’s laws, not by civil disobedience to “the powers that be,” that we shall be saved from the dreadful consequences of human sinfulness of which racial prejudice and discrimination are only the symptoms. To get rid of the evils which afflict our lands it is not sufficient to combat its outward symptoms. but to remove the germ. That germ is the modern belief that man’s reason and will rather than God’s, are supreme in the universe. The only lasting antidote to man’s inhumanity to man is belief in God as man’s Creator and in the Lord Jesus Christ as his Savior.
1. Quoted in Social and Political Philosophy, edited by J. Somerville and R. E. Santoni (Dollbk-dny New York 1963) p. 283ff.
2. Martin Luther King, Why We Can’t Wait (Harper and Row, New York, 1966), p. 25.
3. H. Dooyeweerd, The Christian Idea of the State (Craig Press. Nutley, N.J., 1968), p. 41f.
4. Ibid., p. 44.
5. Jean Calvin. Institute, edited by M. Lefrance (Geneva, 1541). p. 782; 1559 edition, Chapter XII, p. 561.
6. Jean Calvin, Lettres Francaises, edited by J. Bonnet (Paris, 1854), Vol. II, p. 382.
7. John Plamenatz, Man and Society (Longmans. London, 1967), Vol. I, p. 59.
8. Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic; United Netherlands (London, 1880) Vol. II, p, 155.
9. Dooyeweerd, The New Critique, Vol. III, pp. 662–683. For a brilliant treatment of this subject consult Robert A. Nisbet, Tradition and Revolt (New York, 1968).
Reprinted from the forthcoming book REFORMATION OR REVOLUTION, with permission.
E.L. Hebden Taylor is assistant professor of economics and sociology at Dort College, Sioux Center, Iowa.
For Martin Luther King, civil disobedience meant the same thing. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” published in his book, Why We Can’t Wait, King wrote: “One may well ask, ‘How can you advocate breaking some of the laws and obeying others?’ I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws…. A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.”2
For King a good end may justify the resort to evil means. “It is right to break laws if we think that they are unfair and can get publicity for a good cause by doing so.” Upon this basis King advocated disobedience of the segregation ordinances of various American states. Because they are morally wrong they should not be obeyed. In pursuit of this policy King met his tragic death, thereby proving that civil disobedience invites a counter appeal to force, and if indulged in by everyone will soon reduce society to anarchy. While approving of King’s great personal courage and his Christian stand for justice, we must reject his appeal to violence. The means one adopts to achieve a given end will always determine the nature of the end achieved. King allowed himself to be used by groups in society who exploited him for their own evil ends. Let his terrible fate be a warning from the Lord not to follow his example of playing with fire from hell. At the same time, let us continue the struggle for justice in race relations for which he ,gave his life, using more Christ-like methods to attain the same end for which he struggled. It is for reformation of society that we must work, not for revolution.
Power and Authority
Ever since the French Revolution proclaimed the revolutionary doctrine of popular sovereignty instead of God’s sovereignty summed lip in the confession “no God no master,” the crucial distinction between power and authority has been blurred or lost. Frightful tensions and rifts in society are bound to develop whenever the state or the general will of the majority or the party claims to he sovereign, that is, the source of both authority and power in society. Authority over men can be vested only in Almighty God, who allocates to the various separate spheres of society their own respective functions of power. All governmental authority has a divine and not a human origin which alone can keep it within bounds. What is true of governmental authority is also true of all other kinds of authority.
The police do not have authority because they carry weapons of self-defense, but because they exist to uphold the majesty of the law and maintain peace and order in society. The father does not have authority because he is bigger than his child, but because God has appointed him to that office in creation. Nor does the teacher exercise authority over his pupils because he is stronger than they, but because he acts in the place of the parents when they are at school. The authority of the government over its citizens, of parents over their children, of employers over their workers, is directly derived in each case from God alone. As the Lord told Moses from the midst of the bush that burned but was not consumed, “I AM THAT I AM” (Exod. 3:14), the source of all that exists outside himself. Apart from him nothing could exist.
As sovereign Lord of his own creation the Lord God has only delegated to each sphere of society the authority necessary for it to carry out its own proper function. Thus God has delegated some of his authority to husbands and commanded that wives must obey them (Eph. 5:22). He has also delegated some of his authority to parents and commanded children to obey them (Exod. 20:12; Eph. 6:1).
Civil Authority Originates with God
Likewise, God has delegated to the state the power of the sword of justice so that it may restrain the evil doer. For this reason Paul teaches in the Epistle to the Romans, “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God” (Rom. 13:1). In other words, all civil authority has its origin in God, whether it realizes the fact or not. Of the state Dooyeweerd writes:
In the divine structural principle of this societal relationship the power of the sword is unbreakably bound up with the typical end-function of the state, that is, the maintenance of a public jural community of rulers and subjects. All the intrinsic matters of state ought to be directed by this juridical function… A state where the power of the sword becomes an end in itself degenerates into an organized band of highwaymen, as Augustine and Calvin remarked.
A public community of law which, as end function, qualifies the state, is utterly different from the internal jural community of other societal relationships, such as family, school or church. In all of these the internal rural community is directed by the peculiar end function of the relationship concerned…
Only in the case of the state does the jural community function as the end function, but always founded upon the territorial organization of the power of the sword. The internal community of law of the stale is a community of jural government, where the government, as servant of God, does not carry the sword in vain. The government may, in accordance with the state’s inner law of life, never allow itself to be led by any other point of reference than that of justice. But here is no talk of a private community of law, as in other societal relationships, but a public one, subject to the jural principle of the common good. And exactly here, in the understanding of the principle of the common good the difference between Christian and pagan or humanistic ideas of the stale becomes clearly evident.3
Dooyeweerd then explains in The Christian Idea of the State that this difference between the Christian and the apostale humanist idea of the state lies in the fact that the former Christian idea “has principally broken with any absolutization of either state or individual. It alone can grasp the principle of the common good as a truly jural principle of public law because it is grounded in the confession of a supra-temporal root-community of humanity in the kingdom of Jesus Christ, and because it accepts therefore the principle of sphere-sovereignty for the temporal societal bonds.”4
It is the state as limited by God’s absolute sovereignty and not to the totalitarian state of modern society that the Christian is to be obedient. Since the authority of such a limited state is derived from God and not from the will of the majority or the will of the party, God demands that we respect and obey its officers.
In this matter of obedience to governments, Peter says: “Be subject to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake, whether to the king as supreme or unto governors, as sent by him” (I Peter 2:13–14). Civil obedience to the limited state under God is thus a fundamental moral obligation laid upon every citizen of the land, and to disobey the civil authority is to disobey God. The civil authorities are “holy servants” of God whether they believe in God or not, since they have been instituted to hold in check man’s sinful tendencies. In terms of this plain teaching of Scripture, civil disobedience is revealed as a policy of the anti-Christ. Without obedience to the law-enforcing functions of government, society must inevitably collapse. For God’s Word that which defines the anti-christ, the man of sin, the godless man is precisely his will to live without any law at all (II Thess. 2:3–8).
A Time to Disobey
Yet the Bible itself also teaches that there is a time to disobey the government. The divine right of kings and rulers is always qualified by that divine right to the obedience of men’s hearts which is unlimited, final, and absolute. In the last analysis we must always obey God rather than the government. parental, or economic authority when it commands us to sin. As Peter says, “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).
For example, if a drunken father tried to force his son to sin, then it would be the child’s duty to disobey. Or if the government commands the Christian to sin, he must refuse to obey.
When Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego were commanded by King Nebuchadnezzar to fall down and worship the golden image they rightly refused. With marvelous courage they told the king, “Be it known unto thee that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set” (Dan. 3:18). As a result they were cast into the fiery furnace, from which God miraculously delivered them.
How terrifying is such power to the mere individual. It is usually arrayed in terrifying conformity, as in Babylon of old. All have to think the same thoughts and to act in the same way most favorable to the dictator of the day. Thus in the days of King Nebuchadnezzar, all the princes, the governors, the captains, the judges, the treasurers, and the counselors had to conform; all except three young men who refused to fall down and worship the golden image.
In this clash between the powers of heaven and earth it is obvious that the earthly king had no idea of power except that of brute force. He, knowing his strength in this direction, found it most disturbing that there should be anyone who would attempt to resist him. This was a new experience for King Nebuchadnezzar. He could not believe his ears when it was reported to him. When finally he did understand he could not conceal the rage that welled up within him. Such opposition could not be tolerated. It must be crushed, burnt out, and destroyed.
Even so have the mighty spoken throughout all history. In a fit of rage the emperor Nero burnt thousands of Christians in the gardens of his palace. Ivan the Terrible murdered whole families to gratify his rage.
An Obligation to Resist
John Calvin made resistance to unjust princes not only permissible but an absolute obligation, but only when undertaken by duly constituted representatives of the people. While deprecating in the strongest terms the right of resistance on the part of “private persons,” he exhorted municipal authorities, estates-general, and parliaments to call rulers to account as part of their vocation as God’s magistrates. In some countries or states, he taught, there have existed magistrates specially instituted to restrain the doings of the chief magistrate. Such were certain officials of Athens, Sparta, and Rome. and such, he declared, “are possibly, nowadays, in each kingdom the three estates assembled.”5 It would, by hypothesis, be lawful for such magistrates to resist tyrannical action and, therefore, it would be their duty to do so. Failing to do so they would betray the liberty of their people.
In a letter to the French Huguenot leader, Coligny, written in 1561, Calvin applied this principle of the duty of resistance on the part of “minor magistrates” such as members of Estates-General. He had, he said, been asked beforehand, whether in view of the oppression of the “children of God” in France, active resistance would not be justified. He had answered, he declared, that it were better that all the said children of God should perish rather than that the Gospel should be dishonored by bloodshed. But he had added that if the Princes of the blood took action to maintain their legal rights and if the Parlements of France joined with them, then indeed all good subjects might lawfully aid them in arms, in defense of their legal rights, even against the legitimate sovereign.6 This doctrine was suited to the special needs of the Huguenots. Though they were only a minority in France and could not hope to control the Estates-Ceneral, many of them were noblemen or wealthy merchants, who held the chief magistracies and controlled the highest courts of their own provinces. Calvin’s doctrine of active resistance by lesser magistrates to the sovereign or supreme magistrate justified their using their local privileges in defense of their faith. John Plamenatz in Man and Society comments on this doctrine as follows:
Calvin’s doctrine, slightly altered to meet the needs of the Huguenots, was at bottom only the medieval theory of resistance, as we find it in Aquinas, which asserts, not a right of individual or even popular resistance, but a right of official or privileged resistance. According to this theory, only those who already have authority have the right to resist authority. The mere citizen or subject has no such right.7
John Knox vs. Bloody Mary
The first important group of political Christians to oppose absolutism were the British refugees from the persecution of Bloody Mary in the 1550’s. John Knox, Bishop Ponet, and Goodman, in particular, fled to the Continent and from there urged resistance and the deposition of England’s queen. They justified Wyatt’s Rebellion against Mary on both biblical and constitutional grounds, appealing to the compact between ruler and people in natural law. The Geneva Bible, with its annotations, was to disseminate these ideas widely in England. Calvin himself rather guardedly followed the current, trying to moderate the more turbulent. Goodman reported that Calvin had censured his How Superior Powers Ought to Be Obeyed as “somewhat harsh” to rulers, but nevertheless essentially true. And in the year in which Knox left to take part in the revolution in Scotland, Calvin brought out the last edition of the Institutes with the famous paragraph inculcating the duty of resistance on the part of “minor magistrates.” The decade closed with declarations of constitutional rights against tyrants by the Scots Assembly and a group of the French Reformed. In the First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, John Knox declared it was the duty of the English people to depose Mary Tudor, who was persecuting the true faith. Though her title to the throne might be good by English law, that law stood for nothing against the authority of Scripture.
In terms of this Reformed doctrine of the right to resist tyranny the lesser magistrates of the Netherlands in 1581 deposed Phi lip of Spain on the grounds of a broken contract in natural law and justice. Philip’s attempt, through Cardinal Granvelle and the Duke of Alba, to reduce the Low Countries to the status of a Spanish province met with determined opposition among all classes of society, Roman Catholics and Protestants alike. And no wonder. The number of those who were put to death for their Reformed faith in the Netherlands alone, during the reign of Charles V, has been estimated by Sarpi in his History of the Council of Trent as 50,000, while Grotius put it at 100,000. At least half as many perished under King Philip II. Motley points out in The Rise of the Dutch Republic:
Upon the 16th of Feb. 1568, a sentence of the Holy Office condemned all the inhabitants of the Netherlands to death as heretics. From this universal doom only a few persons especially named were excepted. A proclamation of the king dated ten days later, confirmed this decree of the Inquisition and ordered it to be carried into instant execution. Three millions of people, men, women and children, were sentenced to death in three lines.8
Calvinism the Model in Europe
The Calvinist federalism or pluralism of the consequent United Provinces became the working model of free institutions to seventeenth century Europe. Neville Figgis points out in From Gerson to Grotius the Dutch republic became the pioneer of liberty in modern as distinct from medieval Europe. Tn the age of the Roman and Anglican absolutists, Richelieu, Bousset, and Laud, the Dutch jurist Althusius stood out as the great representative Reformed political theorist, who built a rounded political system uniting popular sovereignty with the medieval Christian principles of the inherent and inalienable natural rights of communities within the state. The social community, as it existed in the thought of Althusius, is a community of communities, an assemblage of morally integrated lesser associations and groups. Its unity does not result from being permeated with sovereign law, extending from the top through all individual components of the structure. Of the profound significance of Althusius’ contribution to political and social theory Dooyeweerd writes: It is no accident that it was a Calvinistic thinker who broke with the universalistic conception of the State in a period in which Bodin’s concept of sovereignty had introduced a new version of this universalistic view. In opposition to the entire medieval-Aristotelian tradition Althusius gave evidence of taking account of the internal structural principles of society in his theory of human symbiosis.
It was the famous jurist, Johannes Althusius, in his Politica, who made the following remark: “I do not call ‘members of the State,’ or of the universal symbiotic community, the separate single human beings, or the families, nor even the colleges according to their being constituted in a particular private and public association, but a number of provinces and districts agreeing to form one whole by mutual conjunction and communication.”
The foundation of this view, which clearly contradicted the Aristotelian teleological conception of the State’s parts, is to be found in the first chapter of his work. Here he summarized his anti-universalistic standpoint with respect to the inter-structural relation between the different types of social relationships as follows: “Every type of social relationships has its proper laws peculiar to it, whereby it is ruled. And these Jaws are different and divergent in each kind of social relationship. according to the requirement of the inner nature of each of them.” This utterance may be considered the first modern formulation of the principle of internal sphere-sovereignty in the societal relationships.9
Reformation, not Revolution
Summing up, we may claim that legal wrongs must be redressed by legal means. In an “open society” resort must always be made to reasoned discussion of grievances. Such legal processes may be slow, but they arc still available, and any attempt to by-pass them only creates contempt for law, and, if pushed to excess, can bring about the collapse of society itself when all rights would go by the board. The present type of civil disobedience is a far cry from the right to resist tyranny of the lesser magistrates taught by our great Reformed forebears.
The real answer to the terrible problems now facing America is not revolution by an appeal to the guns of men but reformation by the Word of God. Let Christians work to elect men into the lesser and higher offices of government who will abide by God’s great ordinances for human society, especially the great principle of sphere sovereignty. The answer to the growing bureaucratization and centralization of power in all Western states is not civil disobedience but associative pluralism which will restore to the various spheres of society their divinely given power and authority to carry out the tasks for which they were created by God himself.
Unless the nations return to obedience to God’s structural principles and norms for society in all spheres they too will undergo his judgment just as the Roman; Babylonian, and Egyptian empires did in the past. It is by obedience to God’s laws, not by civil disobedience to “the powers that be,” that we shall be saved from the dreadful consequences of human sinfulness of which racial prejudice and discrimination are only the symptoms. To get rid of the evils which afflict our lands it is not sufficient to combat its outward symptoms. but to remove the germ. That germ is the modern belief that man’s reason and will rather than God’s, are supreme in the universe. The only lasting antidote to man’s inhumanity to man is belief in God as man’s Creator and in the Lord Jesus Christ as his Savior.
1. Quoted in Social and Political Philosophy, edited by J. Somerville and R. E. Santoni (Dollbk-dny New York 1963) p. 283ff.
2. Martin Luther King, Why We Can’t Wait (Harper and Row, New York, 1966), p. 25.
3. H. Dooyeweerd, The Christian Idea of the State (Craig Press. Nutley, N.J., 1968), p. 41f.
4. Ibid., p. 44.
5. Jean Calvin. Institute, edited by M. Lefrance (Geneva, 1541). p. 782; 1559 edition, Chapter XII, p. 561.
6. Jean Calvin, Lettres Francaises, edited by J. Bonnet (Paris, 1854), Vol. II, p. 382.
7. John Plamenatz, Man and Society (Longmans. London, 1967), Vol. I, p. 59.
8. Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic; United Netherlands (London, 1880) Vol. II, p, 155.
9. Dooyeweerd, The New Critique, Vol. III, pp. 662–683. For a brilliant treatment of this subject consult Robert A. Nisbet, Tradition and Revolt (New York, 1968).
Reprinted from the forthcoming book REFORMATION OR REVOLUTION, with permission.
E.L. Hebden Taylor is assistant professor of economics and sociology at Dort College, Sioux Center, Iowa.