Kuyperianism and War

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

Well, I am tasked this evening with speaking on Kyperianism and war, and of all people, Kyperians should know when and why to fight. But for all that, this isn’t going to be a message about tanks and guns and about bayonets and bombs as interesting as all of that is. Or even about the history of Kyperians in warfare, relatively speaking, that’s a short history, if we want to use the term Kyperian proper, but rather it’s about Kyperianism and war.

And I would make the case that Kyperianism is a great mitigator of war, even just war. And that war occurs when there is a large scale violation of sphere sovereignty. So the more I thought about this connection between Kyperianism and war and the deeper I dug, the more this became a bit of an overview and apologetic for sphere sovereignty proper. So it does, as certainly as possible, that we could have gotten this far into this series without some of you having a firm understanding of what sphere sovereignty actually means. And if that’s the case, then this is for you. This hopefully should be helpful tonight. We will talk some about that.

We’ll be returning to that theme periodically. And to be sure, sphere sovereignty is not present in every culture. But where it is, we definitely find a recipe for human flourishing. And when it’s violated on a small scale, all the way to a grand or national scale, bad things happen. I would continue to argue then that without the violation of sphere sovereignty, there can be no war. I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise, but as I’ve tested this theory, I’ve yet to see an exception. To be sure, before the violations occur at the national level, there are likely multiple violations at the private or the societal level.

Reject Christianity in the home, for instance, and next thing you know, Germany is violating the sovereignty of Belgium, and England goes to war with Germany. Or we see principles of sphere sovereignty as articulated by Kuyper long, long before Kuyper. We see principles, even in Old Testament Israel, the political state of Israel acts idolatrously. And so there weren’t clearly defined, at certain times in Israel’s history, spheres of church and state, right? But so then when there would be an idolatrous act or affect or vibe or trajectory in the nation, that would invite God’s corrective judgment.

So Israel acts idolatrously and the Southern Kingdom is taken captive by Assyria, the Northern Kingdom, by Babylon, all the way around. But regardless, then those act idolatrously and they’re taken over by the Medes and the Persians who are then conquered by the Greeks, who are conquered by the Romans, to destroy themselves with some help from the Gauls and the cycle continues, it goes on and on and on. Neither does church history escape this principle.

Constantine proclaims the tolerance of Christianity throughout the empire in 313. A few hundred short years later, the Holy Roman Empire is a world power funded by the state and controlled by the church. Churches are built with tax dollars and those lines are blurred rather than being clear. Ministry is rather profitable, and Popes and archbishops wield tremendous political power. The church and the state are like vinegar and baking soda. When they’re combined, it’s volatile and it’s never boring, but they’re most stable when they operate independently.

And there are too many examples for us to cite here, but again, one could reasonably argue that were it not for the violation of sphere sovereignty, there would be no need or opportunity for war, but nevertheless violates fear sovereignty, we do. And why is that? Well, of course there’s lots of reasons and some of them are more nuanced, more explainable, more complicated than others, but all of them are sinful. And we’ve seen that happen in our lives when the state tries to tell the church how to operate or tells families what completely legal acts they may not perform in their own homes. We’ve also seen the cost of being ignorant about fear sovereignty when churches have complied because they had no good reason not to.

And certainly no conviction to do so as well, not to. To be clear, this isn’t about the efficacy of mass to stop the spread of coronavirus. That’s not what this talks about. It is about the violation of sphere sovereignty and when that requires resistance. It is no violation of sphere sovereignty for a bureaucrat to make recommendations to church officials about safety precautions, sure. It is a violation of sphere sovereignty for a governor to issue a memo to churches about how they may carry out drive-in church, prohibiting singing and communion during a worship service.

It is a violation of sphere sovereignty for the church to protect a murderer or to try to set up a policy for how many children the church families may or may not have. It’s a violation of sphere sovereignty when one state goes to war with another state on a much, much bigger scale. That’s sphere sovereignty applied on the macro level, but it may still be just. Some of you are probably familiar with just war theory. That was articulated early on by the Roman statesman, Cicero, the great orator. It was modified for application of the church by the church father, Augustine, and then still later amended by Thomas Aquinas.

So there are different iterations of just war theory, but in common to those iterations are a few key principles, namely, war may only be waged by a legitimate authority. War may only be waged in order to punish wrongdoers. The goal of the war must be to secure peace and righteousness and combatants must use no more force than is absolutely necessary to achieve that goal. Hyperionism informs our understanding of those first two principles, namely, it must be waged by a legitimate authority and it must be waged in order to punish wrongdoers and only then. It informs our understanding of those first two principles and biblical ethics, morality, the law of God, they inform our understanding of the last two.

What is a legitimate authority? Who are, in fact, wrongdoers, deserving of punishment, extended to further than when do we have a right to go to war? Well, rooted in the Bible, Hyperionism offers a formula, as you’ve said, for the flourishing of society. If we do what Kuyper has suggested, We’re probably going to do very, very well. However, the sovereignty of each of Kuyper’s spheres must be respected in order for this to take place. And that quite simply is what sphere sovereignty means. It means that there are different spheres in a society in which people operate that need to be left alone to operate according to, well, their own consciences and their own laws and the rest.

all under the overarching umbrella of the lordship of Christ and the sovereignty of God. So God has established a church, the state, and the family. And the other spheres are natural to a society and must be left alone as well in order to operate without interference of the other spheres. That is to say again that rightly speaking, education is its own sphere that should not be violated by the state. and yet ours is run largely by the state. The commerce, the marketplace should not be, should not be being dictated by the church or the family and so on. But remember then the unique role that the family and the church play within relation to the other spheres.

These spheres produce the people who operate in the other spheres. It’s not the job of the family to tell the state how to operate per se, but the state operates freely by and with people that come from families, right? And ideally, those people would also come from the church. Likewise, the church is not tasked with running the state, but the church is tasked with making disciples who operate faithfully and freely in the sphere of the state and the other spheres as well.

So if the church is left alone to operate according to the law of God, then, and we do so, and we’re faithful, then we will produce very effective people who will operate in those different spheres. And the reverse then is not true. It is not the duty of the state to produce people who will operate families, churches, the marketplace, and so on. Yet many in our culture today believe that this is precisely the duty of the state, which is curious. How do we get here? Well sin, of course, but I would suggest that one of its tools was secular humanism.

And we could trace, and secular means a-religious, not religious, right? And humanism means that humanity is the pinnacle of existence. We are actually great. And humanism is not a new concept either. So we could trace the influence of secular humanists back a long way, but that’s not the aim tonight. Suffice it to say that men have been denying the existence of God since the Old Testament times. We know that. And they have been trying to make a name from themselves independently of God for just as long.

This is a pervasive theme from Babel to Rome to the Renaissance among those secularists who are making these amazing discoveries while also supposing that the ability to do this came from themselves. The ability to make this progress came not from God but from themselves, the mighty and ever evolving human race. It is an act of cosmic humanism to try to build the Tower of Babel, for instance. Look at us, we’ll make a name for ourselves. And so exercising their own ingenuity and prosperity, well, I guess their ability, God recognized their acting independence and judged them accordingly. Now this philosophy really came into full bloom between about 1850 and 1917 with modernism, But I want to take just a moment to consider Georg William Friedrich Hegel.

Maybe you’ve heard of him. He lived from 1770 to 1831, and he would have called himself a Christian. Nevertheless, his views about the role of the state have given rise to our own. Very, very, very influential Western, a modern Western philosopher. He’s like a modern Plato in terms of his influence. But I’m not an expert on Hegelian systems of thought, and it’s not our aim here to try to flesh them out. But for Hegel, an individual supreme duty is to be a member of the state.

He said that, so just buckle up and listen to this, the state is the divine idea as it exists on earth. We must therefore worship the state as the manifestation of the divine on earth. The state is the march of God through the world. The state must be comprehended as an organism to the complete state belongs, essentially, consciousness and thought. The state knows what it wills. The state exists for its own sake. The state is the actually existing realized moral life. Pretty creepy, yeah?

And that’s from Open Societing of its Enemies by Karl Popper, it’s quoted there on my previous quotation, Supreme Duty is to be a member of the state, it’s from his Elements of Philosophy of Right. So likewise, Rousseau, some of you will have heard that name, a French political philosopher, he wrote The Social Contract, and many of you have read that, he believed that sovereign authority resides with the will of the people, which they express when they all get together and vote. And he went further to suggest that it must be right. Well, these ideas do come from the same place, materialism. And we mentioned secular humanism, but materialism would be saying that what we can see, sense, hear, is all that there actually is.

Communism is fundamentally materialistic. And so is this. There’s nothing transcendent. There’s no standard for morality outside of ourselves. There’s no soul. Just materialists. Just strictly material. So this comes from materialism and the rejection of the spiritual, but we have seen that creep into the church in different ways. Man is a product, they say, of his influences. So have you ever heard a blank slate theory that he comes out a blank slate and then is strictly the product of those things that are scratched onto that slate from outside sources. If that’s the case, then it is the duty of the state to make sure that those influences are good.

That’s the sequence of thought of the materialistic secular humanist in this case. Well, that’s wrong on its face, but it also has another big fat problem, which I’ll get to. Again, if man is basically good, he’s born blank, right? If he is simply the product of his influences, then the state has a duty to make sure that those inputs are good. The state then assumes to itself authority over the other spheres. So if you were to look at a diagram, which you would see in the biblical worldview, would be, as I mentioned, the overarching umbrella of the lordship of Christ and the other spheres operate sovereignly under them.

But if you are a materialist, then it’s a short step to that overarching authority that to the Christian belongs to God, giving that to the state. So it’s the state’s job to make sure that the church and the family and the marketplace and academia, they all operate the way that they’re supposed to. Or that those inputs are good. But what is the problem there? If there’s nothing transcendent, if there’s nothing beyond the material, then there’s no objective standard for morality.

The Apostle Paul illumines why this idea is bound to fail. He says in Romans three, verses 10 through 18, none is righteous, no, not one, no one understands, no one seeks for God. All have turned aside, together they have become worthless. No one does good, not even one. Their throat is an open grave. They use their tongues to deceive. The venom of asps is under their lips. Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. And their paths are ruined in misery. And the way of peace they have not known. There’s no fear of God before their eyes. This is a universal indictment on natural man.

Humanity is in trouble. If you’re familiar with Romans, this is part of the bad news that gets really, really, really bad before it gets really, really, really good. But first of all, all men are wicked. There aren’t any who are good. Paul says it right here and inspired by the Holy Spirit. This means that all of those men who we would like to think would wish to plan good things for men are unable to do so. Further, they’re lying. They don’t actually want to plan good things for men. They want to control the men.

They don’t actually want to plan good for other men, but rather evil. And as you said, the problem for the secularists, they have no fixed reference for goodness at all. If we want for those inputs to be good, what does that mean? Are you talking about what’s been most expeditious for humanity over the course of history? Well, if that’s the case, then have men marry women. It’s a really good idea. It’s not new or novel, but we think these things are subject to the collective will.

If there is no God who decides what’s good, where does morality come from? If Rousseau is right and it’s what the people decide, that standard can change radically in a short time span. Just like our culture’s opinion of same sex marriage, for instance. Yet it is the secular state that is undertaking to make laws, and this is a grand irony. The secular state is undertaking to make laws and ostensibly in the interests of those once blank slates that voted them into office. And the irony gets thicker. The presupposition that there is such a thing as a moral good is itself, in the first place, a religious assumption.

That is, if God exists, we must answer to him. If he does not, then I can do whatever I want. But as the apostle has shown us, altruism, that is, others interested in us, being interested in others, does not square with the nature of humanity. Just like those pigs in Animal Farm, we shortly become the very thing that we’ve sworn to abandon, exploiting along the way those that we vow to protect.

Without God, we are left to depend upon the state to educate us. to shape us morally and to protect us. But what happens when one state attacks, another state attacks our state, for instance? Or if Christians on a smaller scale, for us anyway, what about when the state inserts itself into the operations of our daily lives or of the church or of the family? In these cases, it is necessary to resist in order that fear sovereignty may be retained unto the flourishing of a society. In other words, this means war. So I want to talk briefly about two categories of resistance, defensive resistance and offensive resistance.

So when it comes down to that, what ought we to do? Christians, so first I’m on defensive resistance, Christians need to know what hills to die on. We need to know where to dig in and we need to know where to defer, even cheerfully. Once fear sovereignty has been compromised, we must work to correct it, but in the process of righting a wrong, we must be careful not to commit an additional act of the violation of fear sovereignty ourselves. For instance, we shouldn’t expect for the church to take up arms against the state to protect the family. But most modern American Christians are far from being in danger of going too far, and our resistance.

Rather, we’re not going far enough. Part of the reason that our culture is so easily duped is that they don’t know any better. I mean, it’s bonafide, good old fashioned ignorance. They don’t know that they have the right to bear arms, to redress grievances, to assemble and so on. Of course, for us, these rights are protected in the Bill of Rights, but if you don’t read the Constitution, then you’re at the mercy of other people to tell you what’s in them, whether those people have read the Constitution or not. And if they have, they still might not necessarily be honest. I’m reading Animal Farm along with some of the students right now.

And in it, Snowball the Pig convinces his comrades, and they use that word, that Napoleon the Pig, not Bonaparte, Napoleon the Pig, was sacrificing so much to bear the mantle of leadership, that it was a heavy burden that he bore, while he was meanwhile selling off the hen’s eggs, drinking the cow’s milk and his mash, sleeping in Farmer Jones’s bed, and drinking Farmer Jones’s liquor. All while the animals on the farm were struggling to scratch out their existence through a bitter winter. Of course, part of the genius of that book is that these pigs are not unique and we find easy application among humans. They are doing what all the godless and the amoral will do if they are given the opportunity.

They will exploit those that they are charged to serve. And our culture is godless and amoral. So we need to know and exercise our rights or we will not long have them. Additionally, and this again under the category of defensive resistance, we are generally happy to surrender our rights for sake of free stuff. We will surrender the right to train our children if somebody else will do it for us because frankly it’s hard work. We’ll let somebody else make the curricular decisions too so that we don’t have to. We’ll be duped into thinking that they are the ones making such great sacrifices to train our children. when like Napoleon they’re only being shrewd and strategic.

They’re turning our kids against us. We’ll pay high taxes if the government will take care of us because we trust them to do more with our dollars than we can do with them. Somebody has to pay for that school system, right? Or Social Security and Medicare and the public library and the men who will fill those potholes on Grove Street. I’ve talked about the potholes on Grove Street before. And I’m not saying that all of those things are objectively bad but they could be privatized. they could be outsourced. And if we don’t know our rights, then we will remain oblivious to the sovereignty of the church or any of the spheres, meaning we will not know when our family’s sovereignty or the church’s sovereignty is being violated.

If we don’t know these things, because it willfully surrendered them. If we don’t know them, then we’ll never know when it’s necessary or even good to defend ourselves. But if we do, then we can say no. It’s important that we understand these principles at the household level and the individual level, or else we cannot apply them at the community or the county or the state or the national levels. For instance, imagine if a town of 10,000 people all homeschooled their children.

Theoretically, the local public school would close, its employees would get other jobs, the sales and the property taxes would go down and life would go on, right? It doesn’t sound too outrageous, but give it a shot and look at what happens in response. In all likelihood, such a situation would invoke a bureaucratic panic, and the populace would be scorned as backward, and the media would call them derelict parents.

But so what? Or what if every adult in Chicago, lawfully and responsibly, secured and carried a firearm. We can hear what the shrieking left would say right now, gun violence will skyrocket. They’ll start killing each other. What would happen to violent crime really?

And I’ll like to hit it with plummet. And what would such a people, how would such a people respond then if the headline, Illinois governor to sign bill banning concealed weapons, they would probably invoke the second amendment and not let it happen. And how would they not let it happen. They wouldn’t let it happen. Let’s say he did sign it, then they would collect enough signatures to overturn it. In our great country, there are processes to redress grievances like that, but they wouldn’t let it happen. Go up another thousand feet. What if the same well-informed population were watching a debate among presidential candidates and one of those candidates began to pay homage to Mao and Stalin? Calling them pioneers and innovators whose policies are worth implementing in the United States as we look to finally securing equality in our nation.

What if that candidate said the churches were actually the ones to blame for the division in our nation and that closing them down would be a priority in his first hundred days in office? I mean, it seems kind of ludicrous, right? But then, right, that’s what I was going next. It’s really not that ludicrous. So I mean, I was able to track my wife’s walk through Safeway from miles away using options that we’d turned on on her cell phones. Find my share location. That was sort of creepy. But it’s okay because I’m certain that I was the only one who was tracking her routine. What freedom and convenience, yes? And as I’ll argue later on, this is all far, far from theoretical.

It’s very practical. We have to understand where we are and why it is necessary for fear sovereignty to be maintained and protected or will not care when it’s violated. But what about offensive resistance? What can we do proactively? What can we do to be on the front end of our resistance? We are Christians and we must obey God rather than men. This means that before God, we have a right to resist any tyrant to an infringe on our ability to practice our faith, to gather with the saints and worship, to love one another practically, to raise our children to do the same. So wherever we can, we must submit to God’s constituted authorities as they’ve been put in place by him.

Romans 13.1 says that emphatically clearly. But if and when these authorities ask us to disobey him, we must resist. For now, and in anticipation of The further and future violation of sphere sovereignty we worship we make disciples we build we feast It does take eyes of faith to see that as fighting But that’s exactly what it is and if you don’t believe me then why is it so hard?

Why are we facing such fierce opposition? It’s like ransom who’s on his walk to? to, no, sorry, it’s like Louis on his walk to Ransom’s house at the opening pages of Paralandra. And he’s meeting stiff resistance, and he doesn’t even know it. Or he doesn’t know why it is, only finds out after the fact that there were demons all around him haranguing him and thwarting his progress.

No, make no mistake. The whole Christian life is full of warfare for the moment, though. I’m only going to consider those four that I mentioned moments ago. Worship, make disciples build and feast. We must worship. God commands the worship of his people in countless places in scripture. I did a little bit of digging and it’s a lot. So I’m not going to take time here to list them all. But gathering corporately every week, I think we could agree, is obedient. But not only that, it’s actually really good for us. It’s like eating vegetables. We become like the object of our worship. Psalm 115 verse 8 says that in a context that’s actually a bad one, but it is something that’s unmistakable and unavoidable.

If we behold and worship Christ, we’ll become like Him. And so it’s important that we worship God in spirit and in truth. on 424, lest we find ourselves being conformed to an idol, to something manufactured in our own minds. We want to behold and worship Christ rightly, but if we do, and if we take time each week to stop thinking about ourselves and just for a couple of hours, we would do well. And that is one thing, one of the sort of ancillary benefits to gathering for corporate worship and week by week is you place your focus off of yourself and on some other object, namely Christ. That’s a very, very healthy exercise.

Not just spiritually, but even psychologically. It’s really good for us. Further, when we lock arms with the saints and we worship God together, we sit under the teaching of the word, we commune with the spirit and in the spirit, that worship is effectual. It will have its intended result over time. Yes, it’s true, we proclaim the glories of God for a watching and a curious cosmos. The angels are watching our worship and they’re learning about God by what we say. You may find that crazy, but the angels purpose in existence. The reason they exist is to worship God and there are certain things that they don’t know.

They don’t know what forgiveness feels like. So we have to tell them. We can sing of the glories of God’s forgiveness, and that’s instructive for the cosmos. There’s a lot that happens there, sure. But the word also has its effect on us, and little by little, year by year, we are changed. We are being shaped by Christ, who is personally invested in presenting us to Himself pure and spotless. As the church, we comprise His bride. He wants to present to Himself a pure, spotless bride. He’s personally invested in purifying us. So we do that we gather week by week lock arms of the Saints take communion sing God’s praises hear the word taught apply the word go out and then we go we go people those different spheres and There we operate whether a commercial domestic academic political or otherwise part of our cultural problem Really is that those spheres are populated by the wrong kinds of worshipers We can’t escape being worshipers, but they’re worshiping someone other than the living God.

So we must worship. We also, we must make disciples. This is another aspect of the Christian life. It’s obedience to the Great Commission, but it involves reproducing ourselves spiritually. And time and numbers are on our side if we would take this seriously. It’s a to do a little back-of-the-napkin math. If every mother and father, every faithful Christian mother and father had three kids who were better than them. And there are many mothers and fathers in this room who would say that we have at least three kids who are better than us. By better than us, I mean a much better place, more spiritually grounded, more convinced of the truths of scripture and the reasons to submit to God, even more convinced right down to the marrow of their bones that sphere sovereignty is a thing.

Even if you don’t use those terms or articulate in those ways, In principle, you affirm them. Man, if we did that, if every faithful mother, a Christian mother and father had three kids who were better than us, we could take over the world like that. Because those three children wouldn’t be idle, right? They would be doing things as well. We must train our children to surpass us. It’s okay for it to be our faith. We want them to have our faith. We want them to make it their own as well, sure. But we want them to have our faith. There’s nothing wrong with that. Sean’s talked about that before. We want them to understand our deep and biblical convictions but to do so at a still deeper level.

Importantly, we have to take responsibility and initiative when it comes to training our children. I really can’t stress this point enough in the discussion of warfare because though we prefer to think that information is neutral, though we prefer to believe that to think it’s not the case, there is in fact a war going on for the hearts and the minds of our children. Public schools, popular culture, social media, and they’re working feverishly to undermine biblical morality as antiquated, backward, obsolete, even evil and harmful to others. We must make disciples of our children, disciples who can discern these errors and who believe God’s word, but who also know what sphere sovereignty is and why it’s worth fighting for.

I’m not trying to put sphere sovereignty, this man articulated category on par with just faithful with just faithful Christian discipleship, I think they go hand in glove. And so I think we would do well to try to apply this. Also, we must build, we must build. Having worshiped God at church on Sunday, we go build things during the week. This takes a variety of form, but we must be establishing institutions that will outlast us and that will serve as both places where God’s formula for human flourishing is applied and as training grounds for future disciples. I’ll give a little parenthetical comment about Hyperion dispensationalism here for a moment.

Thinking generationally has not been a hallmark of many dispensationalists. And so those grenades that are lobbed in our direction as being very bunker oriented are in large measure fair. Those are fairly tossed. I am a convinced dispensationalist who believes that nothing needs to happen before the rapture. So the rapture is imminent. I also believe that as a matter of fact, the majority of people are saved because they are in a Christian culture. Whether it is a family culture, so they are born into a Christian home, or they find themselves in a community of believers, and then that faith is contagious. I believe that that formula will affect the greater number of salvation of souls prior to the rapture than door-to-door evangelism, or alarmist rapture fiction, or a bunker mentality.

So it is very much because I believe that this will affect the greatest number of salvations now that I’m committed to building for tomorrow. Build businesses where ethical business practices are normal, where workers and customers are treated as image bearers that command respect because they bear the image of God, where the product actually brings good to the community. Build schools that teach all of the subjects as a glorious integrated whole, the way the mind of God works with the scriptures at the center, where academics serve the greater project of training culture shapers who have substance of character.

Build churches where the worship of God deep and also substantive and joyful where the teaching of the word is central. Practice church discipline to keep her pure and submit to the word. Build institutions where the Christian worldview can be applied unto the good of a whole community whether they’re Christians or not. Fourth under this heading is we must feast. We must feast. Grateful people are really hard to beat. And our grateful receiving is a weapon to be wielded like a bucket of water balloons. I was trying to think of an illustration. It’s like a gratefulness oozy, that’s a little bit graphic. But water balloons, man, those will splash and get you wet.

And they’re also a lot of fun. Throw your thanks around liberally and watch who gets wet. It’s a fact that God gives us lots and lots of really good things. And when we feast, we practice receiving them with potency and intentionality. This receiving is also delightful. As a matter of fact, eating steak and chocolate cake and drinking beer and wine and singing psalms, it’s actually really, really fun.

Beyond this, it brings great delight to the one who has given us those gifts. It reminds us of our victory in Christ. When we are feasting, we do so with gratefulness in anticipation of an already secured victory, and the enemy is reminded of his defeat. And that is the polar opposite of gluttony.

Even if both do involve maybe eating a lot of food. It is absolutely militant, feasting is warfare. So having talked about the offensive and the defensive forms of resistance, we come, I think, full circle. If we can properly understand Kyperianism and sphere sovereignty, then we will see how in the economy of God, sphere sovereignty leads to human flourishing, and the perversion and violation of it leads to the consequences and even chastisement.

When the church submits to the state in the wrong way, it goes badly. When the state submits to the church in the wrong way, it goes badly. When the state assumes inappropriate authority over the family, it goes badly. This is not theoretical. In the last year, we have seen the state, both elected officials and bureaucrats, arrogating to themselves the authority to tell churches how to operate during their worship services. Masking, distancing, no singing, no hugs, or handshakes, and so on. They actually don’t have a right to do this, especially given the actual level of threat posed by this virus in our context.

They have violated the sovereignty of the family by telling us what we are allowed to do in our homes or not, for instance, don’t host parties. They have used their positions of influence and fear-mongering to lend weightiness to their directives and then they’ve appealed to the morality that is taught in our churches to gain our sympathy. Love your neighbor, do your part, mask up. So, and again, all of this deserves qualification. Romans 13 says that God has instituted governing authorities and all who exist exist by his placement. Our submission as far as we possibly can should be to those constituted authorities, but it must stop at the point where sphere sovereignty is violated and or they are commanding us to disobey God.

If there actually were a real bona fide health crisis, then we should cheerfully submit, we should comply. And it has been in some places in the world, deadly and still is. It happens that here, it doesn’t pose that kind of a threat. And in the interest of submitting to governing authorities, many church officials have submitted to unjust orders. In the name of preserving our Christian testimony, We have allowed, we’ve even invited the violation of sphere sovereignty of both church and the state. To their credit, the state totally gets it. If the church has started demanding that all members of Congress be baptized Christians, they would say foul, and they’d appeal to the separation of church and state and chuckle.

Maybe even pat us on the head and say that’s a cute idea. Yet these same politicians and bureaucrats will endeavor to tell preachers that they’re not allowed to preach about politics, or that they need to withhold communion and the worship of Christ from their people. To that we ought to cry, foul and appeal to the separation of church and state, because church and state are their own spheres and ought to be left alone. In his biographical message on Abraham Kuyper, George Grant quotes historian Otto Claussen when he says, when he talks about why it was that the disciples of Abraham Kuyper posed such a threat to Hitler and the Nazi regime in the context of their own worldwide conquest ambitions.

Now I’ve not been able to get my hands on that resource or to confirm the claims, but the resistance itself is pretty well documented and not hard to find. According to Grant, Hitler wanted any who had attended the free University of Amsterdam, which had been founded by Kuiper, to be hunted down and treated as a Jew. So that is interred and potentially executed. He may just have been terrified that those who had been educated to understand sphere sovereignty would know why and when, and maybe even how, to resist tyranny. Because that’s exactly what happened is that Nazis slogged through the Netherlands. They were thwarted, they were undermined repeatedly, they were subverted, and hundreds of thousands of people were hidden from German authorities.

Now there are of course a lot of variables here. It was the Dutch Communist Party, for instance, who was doing the lion’s share of this. The Dutch have a very interesting history of resistance to tyranny, but the anecdote itself is rather believable. Those who do have a deep conviction about sphere sovereignty will know precisely how and when and why to resist in wartime and in the voting booth.

God has established a church in the family and no man or other sphere has the right or the prerogative to disrupt their healthy operation. If we would have a flourishing society, then the church must be allowed to operate freely alongside the spheres of family, academia, commerce, the state.

Because when she does, she will then train up people who will operate faithfully in these spheres unto our collective flourishing. So stay in your lane and work hard, but resist firmly where you see that sphere sovereignty being violated. If we did this remarkably as a global society, we could potentially end war. We would flourish and the faithful nations and the cultures will be populated with principled people who operate with conviction, and who know deeply when and why they must go to war. Let’s pray.

Father, please give us wisdom in this. We thank you for men, fallen men like Kuyper, and Augustine and Aquinas, and even Cicero, who have worked to codify some of these principles we’re looking to apply. We are thankful that you’ve given us your word, which doesn’t change, and if we would submit to it, we would do very well. And frankly, the secularists would also do well if they would submit to these principles, even if they denied your existence. And so we pray that our robust living would be compelling and that we would build and we would feast and we would just know when to push back and have wisdom that comes from you.

So help us to being trained today, go out and operate in our different spheres of influence with faithfulness, and we pray this in Christ’s name, amen.