00:00:26.080If you've watched it before, it's probably been a while.
00:00:28.680it probably wouldn't hurt if you watched it again. The special guest is Glenn Sunshine. He's
00:00:33.260the author of Slaying Leviathan. He's a professor, a speaker, a preacher. He is chocked filled with
00:00:39.760so much biblical wisdom. Now, the title of the episode is this, Do Not Comply, The Democrats
00:00:47.320Playbook for Persecuting Christians. Do Not Comply, The Democrats Playbook for Persecuting
00:00:54.840Christians. Persecution is not coming to America. Persecution is already here. Tyranny is running
00:01:01.600rampant. And Glenn Sunshine and what he says in this episode is so timely for where we're at as
00:01:07.560a nation and where we're at as the church today for equipping Christians to have courage and
00:01:13.840boldness in the face of persecution, in the face of tyranny, in the face of the authoritarian,
00:01:19.520authoritarian tyrannical government that we currently face. You're in for a treat. Enjoy.
00:01:24.820Real quick, before we get started, if you would prayerfully consider supporting Right Response
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00:01:34.980at rightresponseministries.com slash donate. If you're not able to support this ministry
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00:01:59.860Applying God's Word to every aspect of life. This is Theology Applied.
00:02:10.580Hi, this is Pastor Joel with Right Response Ministries. This is our show slash podcast
00:02:15.920called Theology Applied. And today, with this particular episode, I am honored to have as a
00:02:21.080special guest, Glenn Sunshine. He's the author of a book called Slaying Leviathan. And we're going
00:02:27.400to be talking about the topic, the subject matter that his book addresses at great length,
00:02:31.900the idea of civil tyranny, the idea of big government, of government overreach throughout
00:02:39.280human history in different nations and cultures, and the tradition of Christian resistance in the
00:02:45.180midst of civil tyranny. And so I'm pleased and honored to have you. Glenn Sunshine, would you
00:02:50.560take a moment and just introduce yourself to our guest? Tell us a little bit about yourself,
00:02:54.060your ministry, and particularly your book, Slaying Leviathan. Well, thank you for having me.
00:03:01.040I am a college professor. I'm a professor of early modern European history, specialist in
00:03:07.640the Reformation. And along with that, I am involved in a podcast called The Theology Podcast,
00:03:15.840which we do weekly. And I also have a ministry called Every Square Inch Ministries. And anyone
00:03:23.360who is familiar with Kuyper will know the quote, there's not a single square inch in the whole
00:03:27.840domain of human experience over which Christ, who is Lord of all, does not cry mine. And that is
00:03:33.920the origin of the name for the ministry. The book Slang Leviathan came out of a combination
00:03:43.140of things. Some of it was my studies in grad school, but a lot of it really was a response
00:03:51.160to trends that I saw going on a few administrations ago. I started really working on this issue of
00:03:59.260Christian Ideas of Liberty, Tyranny, and Resistance. Well, like I said, a few administrations0.92
00:04:06.780ago, and it seemed time to pull it together into a book, and that's what Slang Leviathan is about.
00:04:13.020The book traces a couple of different kinds of ideas. One of them is where Christian ideas of
00:04:19.480liberty came from, where the ideas of unalienable rights came from. The answer, by the way, is
00:04:25.980medieval theologians, medieval Catholic theologians, interestingly enough. And then from there, we move
00:04:32.440into the Reformation era with resistance theory, Luther's idea of two kingdoms, Calvin's idea of
00:04:38.900covenantal basis of government. And then along with that, the fundamental question of when is
00:04:45.540it legitimate for Christians to resist a properly constituted government? When does a legitimate0.92
00:04:52.500king turn into an illegitimate tyrant. And that thought begins with Luther. It passes through
00:04:59.400the Huguenots to the Puritans and ultimately reaches its probably best expression with John
00:05:05.300Locke. And then from there, it shapes the founding of the United States. Great. Well, I think we're
00:05:13.200in for a treat. So let me just go ahead and hop in with some questions. And I really, I think for
00:05:19.280the benefit of our listeners, it's important that we understand the history. And I know for you and
00:05:23.800your context of being a professor, you're probably like, hey, we can't just talk about the present
00:05:27.860because we'll continue to make mistakes in the present if we don't know our history. So I
00:05:32.000definitely want to give you an opportunity to talk about the history that you go into great
00:05:35.180length in your book addressing. That said, could you, just in simple terms, could you give us
00:05:41.320a brief definition of what is civil tyranny and maybe some of the, you know,
00:05:48.120you know kind of i think it like you know you're redneck if you know like you know you're you know
00:05:53.440you're tyrannical if blank like what constitutes what what is where's the line and what is0.64
00:05:58.420breaching that line so what what constitutes civil tyranny and and then maybe you know speaking to
00:06:03.980some present moments um is is there anything that you see in our current political climate that
00:06:09.680would be an example of that civil tyranny okay yeah there are a couple of different ways we can
00:06:15.680get to this. The first of them is going back to Jesus's words, always a good idea. He says in0.89
00:06:24.400answer to the question about paying taxes to Caesar, he says, render to Caesar the things
00:06:28.400that are Caesar's and render to God the things that are God's. Okay, so that was in the context
00:06:34.620of paying taxes, but I think it's a much broader principle than that. What it says is that the
00:06:39.680government has legitimate authority, but that legitimate authority is limited. There are things
00:06:46.820that properly do belong to Caesar, and there are things that properly belong to God. On a theological
00:06:52.540level, oh, and by the way, God is the one who determines what belongs to Caesar. Let's add that
00:06:58.000one in as well. So on a theological level, civil tyranny occurs when Caesar begins usurping
00:07:05.460authority that he doesn't legitimately have. When Caesar starts extending his power into areas
00:07:13.000that are not properly his. In the early church, this really, the first place where you see this
00:07:21.900argued has to do with freedom of religion, interestingly enough. Religious liberty was
00:07:27.660something that early Christians argued strenuously for, typically on the grounds that worship that
00:07:34.040is compelled is not pleasing to God. So you have to allow people religious liberty, otherwise you're
00:07:42.080compelling worship and that won't please God at all. So basically where that leads is freedom of
00:07:48.420conscience. The only one who has authority over our consciences is God. When the government claims
00:07:55.840authority over your conscious conscience excuse me that is a clear breach of government's
00:08:04.040authority and it's usurping something that properly only belongs to god
00:08:07.600then through the middle ages oh excuse me go on no i was just gonna say what would be what would
00:08:15.320be a practical example of the government um attempting to lay claim on the consciences of
00:08:20.980men? Could you think of something like a tangible example? When the government tells you what you
00:08:28.100must believe about anything, that would be an example of it. In the modern context, now,
00:08:38.120what's interesting here, what's important to note is that even if the government is telling you you0.52
00:08:43.520must believe something that we as Christians know is true, that is still a usurpation of its
00:08:49.400authority. So if the government mandates certain kinds of language, which is really fundamentally
00:08:59.680about thought control, and the government mandates you must, there are certain things that you can
00:09:04.360and cannot say, that is a usurpation of authority that belongs to God, because what it is doing is
00:09:12.620it's saying that you aren't allowed to think these things. Yep, yep. We see some of that going on.
00:09:18.660Oh, absolutely. Then from there, when you move to the Middle Ages, this isn't exactly the argumentation that they use, but the best way to understand it, so this is a later formulation, but the best way to understand it is to ask what rights, what liberties did people have prior to the development of human government?
00:09:41.160because if you have institutions or rights that predate government government cannot claim
00:09:49.140authority over those things because they pre-exist government yeah so the institution of the family
00:09:56.660was established by god in the garden of eden government has no authority to define what it
00:10:01.820means what a family is what marriage is any of those kinds of things it can introduce certain
00:10:08.320regulations, but it cannot change the basic structure of marriage established in Genesis.
00:10:15.620We have the, well, we have liberty itself as an example. Now, liberty needs to be defined here.
00:10:23.840When I was in school, they told me that liberty was just an old-fashioned word for freedom.
00:10:27.400That's actually not true. The concept of liberty in the 18th century was really tied into ideas of
00:10:37.340virtue, ideas of purpose, ideas of living the best, the fullest life possible now,
00:10:45.600which was always a life that was aimed toward, well, virtue. It is freedom that exists within
00:10:54.440boundaries. So in the Garden of Eden, you see liberty in the sense that Adam and Eve are told
00:11:01.380you can eat whatever tree you want to, except that one. There was a boundary they weren't
00:11:06.300supposed to cross. The alternative to liberty is what's known as license in the 18th century.
00:11:12.760It's the root of our word licentious. And license means freedom from restraint.
00:11:19.640Okay. We are not going to accept any boundaries. You can't tell me what to do.
00:11:26.280In the modern world, we have completely lost the concept of liberty because we've lost the
00:11:31.080concept of virtue. And without virtue, you can't have liberty. So all that's left for freedom is
00:11:37.180license. It's freedom from authority. I can do whatever I want to. You can't stop me. You have
00:11:43.760no right to do that. Rather than living within the boundary set by divine and natural law,
00:11:50.760which is what liberty would point to. But that's super helpful. Isn't that what Chesterton said?
00:11:57.080didn't he say like true freedom is found within the bounds or true liberty is found within the
00:12:01.320bounds? I think it sounds like a Chestertonian kind of thing. It sounds like a Chestertonian
00:12:05.260quote. I don't know that one, but it's quite possible. So we can look at liberty as being
00:12:11.760something that is pre-political. The government cannot take that away from us. It cannot take
00:12:17.460away from us our right to pursue a good life, good in the fullest and richest meaning of the word.
00:12:24.760We see the right to property in the garden.
00:13:22.980All of them precede human government in the garden, and therefore government cannot arbitrarily deprive us of any of them.
00:13:31.500Is it true, just for a moment to interrupt, is it true that we actually had that language of life, liberty, and property, and then it was changed later on to the pursuit of happiness?
00:13:47.420Locke said that our unalienable rights are life, liberty, and property.
00:13:51.300Jefferson changed property to pursuit of happiness, but we have to know what happiness means.
00:13:56.920Happiness to Jefferson is, it goes back to a Greek word, eudaimonia. He knows his Aristotle.
00:14:06.480And eudaimonia in Greek philosophy is the highest purpose of life. We have the right to pursue
00:14:16.380our highest ends. That's really what the pursuit of happiness means. And that involves virtue.
00:14:23.320Again, in Aristotle, very clear, it's Arete in Greek, virtus in Latin. The word points to
00:14:33.120excellence, pursuit of excellence in every area of life, again, as a necessary element of
00:14:41.160fulfilling your highest purposes. So the pursuit of happiness really refers to the pursuit of
00:14:47.680your highest good. It's very closely tied to the concept of virtue. And with that,
00:14:55.700we should add that Jefferson firmly believed that property rights were included in there
00:15:00.580because you could not do this without property rights. But he jumped over Locke and went back
00:15:06.880to aristotle for that one got you i appreciate what you're saying in terms of property rights
00:15:11.780the way you were broadening it and your definition because i think typically we just think of property
00:15:17.400rights as the right to own you know physical land but but you were saying it's it's the right to
00:15:22.580to um to the fruit of our labor and um correct me if i'm wrong here but there's an important
00:15:28.760distinction between passive and active rights and there's just there's a lot of things that
00:15:33.080people have begun well it's like the age of entitlement there's a lot of things that people
00:15:37.180feel entitled to they think they have rights to that biblically speaking um and just logically
00:15:42.220speaking they don't and um so if there's a right to free health care then wouldn't that infringe
00:15:48.060on what would technically be described as property rights that if property rights is i have the right
00:15:52.620to my own labor then a doctor who worked hard to gain those skills and knowledge and all that and
00:15:57.020it and he's a human being he it's he only has 24 hours in the day like the rest of us it's his time
00:16:01.900it's his his work his knowledge expertise we're saying his property rights over his labor
00:16:09.020supersedes any pseudo right to health care um and and that would be a passive right correct me if
00:16:16.540i'm wrong i might be getting them backwards but a passive right on the part of the doctor that
00:16:20.300right to the fruit of his labor versus an active right is could you explain that am i am i on to
00:16:26.060something there? Yeah, I think you are. I don't typically use the language of passive versus
00:16:32.440active rights myself, but I know that that's out there. But the key thing here is that if we
00:16:39.780believe in liberty, number one, and property rights defined as the labor theory of property,
00:16:47.060then what's happening with the doctor in that case violates both of them because functionally
00:16:53.880ends up being slave labor. The doctor, if I have an unalienable right to health care,
00:17:01.340then a doctor who refuses to treat me because I won't or can't pay him is violating my rights.
00:17:11.000That's where this goes. And while no one will say that, no one who advocates for the idea of
00:17:17.840health care is the right will say that, that's fundamentally where the use of the language in
00:17:25.220that way leads you automatically to that. You're violating my rights. You don't treat me.
00:17:32.480You're right. You're right. Yeah. Okay. Well, yeah, that's a logical conclusion. It's a train
00:17:39.200that we don't want to be on because the end is dire. Well, you've already kind of been
00:17:44.700dancing around it a little bit and addressing it at some length. But can we go just a little
00:17:49.780bit deeper into John Locke? Who's John Locke? And what's so significant about his contributions?
00:17:55.500And what do you wish Christians knew about John Locke and would fight for with his contributions?0.87
00:18:03.640Okay, before we get to Locke, I want to give you one more definition of civil tyranny.
00:18:08.820Because like I said, there are several different ways you can get here. The other one, I'm going
00:18:13.460going to go with a Kuyperian definition. Kuyper believed that there were a number of spheres of
00:18:19.620life that were, well, autonomous. They were established by God and intended to have autonomy.
00:18:25.820Once again, you can trace a lot of these right back to the garden. Family, labor and business,
00:18:32.180things like that. There are, well, religion, worship. There are a variety of these things
00:18:38.280that predate government, that are therefore autonomous from government, largely independent
00:18:45.880of it. Government has its legitimate sphere, but so does the church, so does the family,
00:18:50.940so does education, so does business and labor, and so on. He called this sphere sovereignty.
00:18:58.200The idea is that each sphere has its own area in which it can govern itself.
00:19:05.520The problem comes up when one sphere, and it is almost inevitably the government, begins to take on roles that properly belong to another sphere.
00:19:18.260And when that happens, we are moving towards civil tyranny.
00:19:23.120The government is once again expanding out of its legitimate zone, which is fundamental definition of tyranny.
00:19:29.000Now, this most often happens when one of the spheres stops functioning properly, when Wall Street is corrupt and you get derivatives trading and things like that, and bubbles like we saw happen a few years ago with the housing crisis.
00:19:46.540um that sphere that we describe that as the sphere collapsing it ceases to function the
00:19:53.720way it's supposed to and then when that happens another sphere has to step in to try to pick up
00:19:58.580the slack or try to get it working again that will most often be the government but the problem is
00:20:03.740the government is incompetent outside of its areas of authority and therefore and sometimes
00:20:09.440sometimes within its area of authority well yeah i mean yeah even within its area of authority it
00:20:15.320can be, but when it steps out of that zone of authority, it is really ill-equipped to do that
00:20:21.920kind of work and frequently makes the problem worse, and it turns into, well, Leviathan. It
00:20:28.380turns into this monster that engulfs everything. And would you agree that even the welfare state
00:20:36.540would be a breach of government stepping into the sphere of the family, that if indeed it's true
00:20:41.740that certain fathers, you know, or even at a epidemic proportion that fathers have failed in
00:20:48.140their responsibility of protection and provision, it still belongs to fathers, it belongs to this
00:20:54.340autonomous sphere, and the government steps in and ends up often doing more harm than good?
00:20:59.740Would that be another example? Well, let's take a look at this in terms of chickens and eggs.
00:21:06.180okay where did the problem start when i was growing up my mother taught in inner city newark
00:21:13.320okay in new jersey um when the riots occurred in 68 my mom and dad put my brothers who were still
00:21:20.640at home and me in a car and drove us through the area during the day where the riots were
00:21:26.120taking place to explain to us why those riots were happening so i had sort of a front well
00:21:33.820backseat view of this literally in this case but she would occasionally she taught special ed and
00:21:43.000she would occasionally go to visit her students at their homes and you know to talk to the parents
00:21:50.280and so on and she came home one day and mentioned that the student that she had gone to visit
00:21:56.980that lived with his mother, but not his father. And, you know, I was 10 years old, something like
00:22:05.540that. I said, well, why doesn't his dad live with him? And she said, well, it's because of welfare.
00:22:12.740And I said, well, what's that? It's, well, the government gives people who are poor money so
00:22:17.760that they can live. But she said, the way the welfare program is set up, they get less money
00:22:26.140if the father is at home with them.0.99
00:22:48.240Even when they were married and didn't want it, they had to leave the house.
00:22:52.120And so what this ended up doing is destroying the African-American family in the inner cities, so that now we have this massive epidemic of unwed mothers, single-parent households, and things like that.
00:23:06.060The family collapsed, but the family collapsed because the government stepped into a sphere that isn't its responsibility.
00:23:14.400The government is not responsible for welfare, especially not at a federal level.
00:23:20.200That's the responsibility of the church. It's the responsibility of local charitable organizations, those kinds of things, because they understand the issues on the ground better and can do a better job than the one-size-fits-none policies of the federal government.
00:23:34.240right right so they created the crisis in family by that that policy which i said like i said it
00:23:42.380was well-intentioned and they were trying to do the right thing and they were trying to be
00:23:45.440responsible and all that sort of thing but the law of unintended consequences which is the only
00:23:50.320universal law of history kicked in destroyed the family and now the government is even more
00:23:57.020in loco parentis than they were before yep i get it all right so now with it with that final
00:24:06.480definition of civil civil tyranny uh do you feel like we're ready to discuss john lock yeah uh let
00:24:12.920let's go to lock lock lock is an interesting guy he's he is really important um in terms of
00:24:21.160political thought. He was a Puritan. Due to a debate over the authorship of the Pentateuch
00:24:30.840that occurred in the intellectual, the key intellectual journal of the day, he moved
00:24:36.340into a more liberal version of Christianity, but he never really lost, you know, his Christian
00:24:41.900roots. And he, you know, he might have been more liberal than we would be comfortable with
00:24:47.980leaning deist and things like that, but I think he's still within the broad Christian tradition.
00:24:56.500What he did is he took a lot of elements of Christian thought that were already in place
00:25:04.340in terms of political theology. So he took the idea of unalienable rights, which was developed,
00:25:11.600like I said, by medieval Catholic theologians. He took resistance theory with its roots in
00:25:17.660Luther, but going through the Huguenots and the Puritans, he took Calvin's idea of covenantal
00:25:23.180government. The idea here is that when God established a government with Israel on Mount
00:25:28.920Sinai in Exodus, he did it in the form of a covenant. And further, he asked them three
00:25:33.800separate times, do you agree to abide by the terms of this covenant? And they didn't ratify
00:25:39.240the covenant until you got the consent of the governed three separate times. So Calvin then
00:25:46.960argued that government must be based on consent of the government. This was not a new idea,
00:25:51.640but he adds to it that the covenantal nature of government. And then this idea is going to pass
00:25:57.360very strongly into the Puritans. They'll develop it further. But all of these different things,0.79
00:26:02.780the idea of unalienable rights, the idea of resistance theory, the idea of covenantal
00:26:07.720government, all of these different things operated sort of in their own lanes. What Locke did is he
00:26:15.680synthesized them. He brought them together into a coherent system that really unified all of these
00:26:23.400different branches of Christian political theology for the first time. And so you get Locke's idea
00:26:29.220that government exists. Now, he secularizes it a bit. He is not as theologically oriented as I
00:26:36.720would like. He changes the language of covenant to the language of contract. Contract is a
00:26:42.400secularization of covenant here. But he argues that government consists of a proper government
00:26:49.380is established as a contract between the government and the people. That that contract
00:26:56.160is based on the idea that it is going to be protecting the people's unalienable rights,
00:27:04.820life, liberty, and property coming out of medieval theologians. And that if the government
00:27:09.280government violates that contract, violates the rights of the people, the people have a right to
00:27:14.040resist. They have a right to stand up, overthrow the government, and replace it with one more to
00:27:19.120their liking. Now, they do need to replace it with another government. We're not talking about
00:27:24.520anarchy. And that other government then is subject to the same contractual obligations
00:27:29.440to the people to protect their unalienable rights as the previous government had been.
00:27:34.920Now, like I said, this is a brilliant synthesis of a lot of elements that already existed within Christian political theology.
00:27:44.820It then crosses the Atlantic and becomes the foundation for Jefferson's thinking with the modification of pursuit of happiness that we talked about before.
00:27:55.000And then this becomes a critical element in the establishment of government, of the United States government.
00:28:03.240Now, there's another element that runs through this that doesn't go through Locke that's worth noting. That comes from St. Augustine. Augustine is the guy, he's probably best remembered today for predestination, but he's also the guy who really codified in a lot of ways the doctrine of original sin.
00:28:19.860and original sin is an important again critically important concept for western political thought
00:28:27.820because what it means is that there is no one that can be trusted with absolute power because
00:28:33.360everyone is corrupt and corruptible therefore government must be limited and must have systems
00:28:40.720of checks and balances in place this again is some part and parcel of the medieval political
00:28:46.480tradition coming out of Augustine. We think of checks and balances as being American, but it
00:28:51.000really dates all the way back into the Middle Ages with roots in Augustine's thought. That became
00:28:57.380really strong with Calvin, who's heavily influenced by Augustine. It goes to the Puritans, the Puritans
00:29:04.160to New England, and thus this fundamental mistrust of government is worked directly
00:29:12.840into the U.S. Constitution through its system of checks and balances, as well, by the way,
00:29:19.940as its utter fear of political parties. One of the things most people don't realize is that in
00:29:26.640the original Constitution, the president was the one who got the most electoral votes. The vice
00:29:32.120president was the guy who got the second highest amount of electoral college votes.
00:29:36.200and the reason they did that is they knew from the experience of republics in italy during the
00:29:45.280middle ages and renaissance that if you get factions in the government um and a faction
00:29:51.380manages to take control it's the death of the republic and so they absolutely feared factions
00:29:57.680and parties now they discovered pretty quickly how are we doing on that glenn yeah well where
00:30:04.560Where does this lead? Think about the checks and balance system. The idea is that you've got three
00:30:11.540major branches of government. I'm going to use that word, even though it's probably not exactly
00:30:17.120correct. You have the executive, the presidency, you have the Senate, and you have the House.
00:30:26.260The judiciary is non-political in principle. Basically, its job is to play referee.
00:30:32.560but between those three branches each of them represents one of aristotle's ideal forms of
00:30:39.660government you've got the monarchial principle in the president you have the aristocratic principle
00:30:45.020in the senate you have the republican principle in the house the idea so it's it's technically
00:30:50.780what's referred to as a mixed state okay an aristotelian mixed state the idea is
00:30:56.860that if any branch of government oversteps its legitimate bounds, the other two will rein it in.0.68
00:31:06.240Okay, because they were trying to use actually original sin to their advantage. The idea is
00:31:15.860that each institution will be so interested in guarding its prerogatives that it won't
00:31:22.740let any other institution overstep its bounds and it'll team up with the other side.
00:31:26.860with the with one of the other institutions to stop presidency gets too big for its britches
00:31:32.120the house and the senate will work against it the senate and the president will work against
00:31:36.120the house and so on that only works if you don't have political parties because once you have a
00:31:44.760political party loyalties are no longer to the institution they're to the party and that crosses
00:31:52.540institutional lines and therefore the system of checks and balances can't work correctly.
00:31:57.740So instead of three united branches of government institutions that you have three different that
00:32:02.800are there but all three of them are fractured with different it's it makes me think kind of
00:32:07.980a silly example but it makes me think of what fantasy football has done to watching football
00:32:12.240no longer do you have an actual team that you're rooting for because you're rooting for all these
00:32:16.800individual players who are spread out on all these different teams and in some way it kind of you
00:32:21.400know ruins the traditional way of watching football i don't know just throwing that out there well
00:32:27.440again the idea is that the different branches of government should be in competition with each
00:32:31.780other and instead what happens that that's how the system of checks and balances it's the only way it
00:32:37.800works but when you get parties and you get the president and the senate and the house or one
00:32:45.580faction you know versus another faction it you the system of checks and balances breaks down
00:32:52.040wow and that's really interesting i did not know even what you said about the you know the guy who
00:32:57.920got the most electoral votes being the the president and then the guy who got the second
00:33:02.280most it's not that just he you know he and his administration you know lose but he's actually
00:33:07.440the vice president i was not aware of that yeah it's it's uh it's a great idea in theory
00:33:14.520in practice, could you imagine President Biden and Vice President Trump or President Trump
00:33:20.140and Vice President Clinton? Right. Yeah. But even that, man, I'd rather that than Biden and Kamala.
00:33:27.280But yeah, I get it. Yeah. So anyway, what you're seeing here in America is a combination of things.
00:33:37.180Locke synthesizes, like I said, brilliantly a lot of elements of Christian political theology.
00:33:42.520and then that gets transported over here with Jefferson. When you add the Puritan component
00:33:48.160heading into the constitution, you get a lot of the ideas from Locke coming in, but you're also
00:33:54.380getting this emphasis on original sin, which Locke didn't have. And as a result, I would argue
00:34:02.900that the American, the founding documents of America, the Declaration and the Constitution
00:34:09.000are probably the ultimate culmination of a long tradition of christian political theology
00:34:18.640and it's really it's really in a lot of ways its last its last expression because shortly
00:34:27.760after the constitution is established you get the french revolution which is a purely secular
00:34:33.040revolution. And with that, it changes the rules. Complete political theory, political thought
00:34:42.060from that point on is dominated by the secular French revolution and the ideas that come out of
00:34:49.140that much more than from Christian political theology, which is really at the root of America.
00:34:55.260yeah yeah okay well so with all that uh well i one of the things i just i gotta play the devil's
00:35:04.840advocate for a moment and i think it'll be helpful for our listeners but i think one of the things
00:35:08.520that i i just constantly hear christians you know use to push back on some of the things you're
00:35:12.180saying is just well what about you know what about romans 13 what about different verses in
00:35:17.560the bible that talk about it seems as though the new testament would say that that there's just this
00:35:22.380blind submission from citizens. Christians should submit to civil governments even when
00:35:29.360they are tyrannical. How would you respond to that? Well, what they're doing is they're1.00
00:35:36.120appealing to Romans 13. What they're ignoring is what Romans 13 says about the purpose of
00:35:44.020government. Romans 13 says that the magistrate exists to punish evil and reward good.
00:35:54.720Right. Are we obligated to obey when the government punishes good and rewards evil?
00:36:04.380When the government is not doing what God has ordained the government to do,
00:36:08.980are we still obligated to obey that? Because in the context of Romans 13, it tells you what the
00:36:17.360government is to be doing. Right. It assumes, yeah, that's the argument that I've always used
00:36:22.320is saying that, you know, all the submission language from citizens to civil government in
00:36:27.600Romans 13, but the, you know, it's all on the backdrop. It's all on the assumption that the
00:36:33.260government is functioning in the way that God ordained it to function, that they're rewarding
00:36:36.420good, that they're punishing evil. They're bearing the sword for just reasons. Um, and so there's
00:36:42.420just, there's a lot of, there's a lot of things that I think, you know, Paul is assuming in Romans
00:36:46.88013, submit to civil governments. And, and, you know, the implicit kind of word is when they look
00:36:54.640like this, this is civil government. This is God's design for civil government. And, and you should
00:37:00.200submit to the, and I mean, he even says like, you know, that would you have no fear, you know,
00:37:05.340of the government you know then then do what is good so even that like shows he's paul i think is
00:37:12.080showing his hand he's showing the assumptions that are baked into the text and saying like
00:37:15.960because if he was just talking about governments period whether they were good you know bad or in
00:37:20.760between then i think he would offer some some clarification when he says you know would you
00:37:25.720have no fear the one you know who rules over you like um then then do instead of saying do what is
00:37:32.380good, he would have to say, do what they want, whether that's actually aligns with God's moral
00:37:37.560law or not. And so, I'm with you. I agree. I think I just, you know, we just often hear
00:37:43.020Romans 13, Romans 13, you know. Yeah. And that comes really from sort of a minimalist
00:37:49.000understanding, going right back to Jesus's words, render to Caesar things that are Caesar,
00:37:54.560and to God's things that are God's. That's going to sort of a minimalist view that says that
00:37:59.600only the things that are explicitly related to worship of God are gods. The government has
00:38:07.360everything else. It's not a Kuyperian view. Yeah. I mean, so if they tell you you've got to worship0.96
00:38:13.820a statue of the emperor, you've got to burn incense to the statue of the emperor,
00:38:17.740yeah, we've got to draw the line there. But pretty much anything else the government tells
00:38:20.680you to do, if it doesn't impinge on that, you need to do. No. Because there are things that
00:38:28.620are not the governments. And they're a lot more than just the things that are explicitly God's,
00:38:34.460the things that God expressly commands. And God owns a lot more than just the church. I mean,
00:38:40.980if I had a dollar for every time, so, you know, Christ is the head of the church, you know,
00:38:44.460Christ is the head of the church, not Caesar. And it's like, I always want to point them to
00:38:48.280Ephesians or Colossians, amen, Christ is the head of the church. But did you know he's also the head
00:38:53.320of all things? Christ is not merely the head of the church, you know. Yeah, when I'm talking about
00:38:58.440the kingdom, I will usually just say, you know, a kingdom, the Greek word Vasileia, translated
00:39:05.360kingdom, really doesn't necessarily refer to a geographic territory. What it refers to
00:39:11.920is the exercise of royal authority. Thus, even if a Roman soldier on an errand for Caesar is not in
00:39:21.900Roman territory, it doesn't matter. He is still, the kingdom is there with him, in him. Okay.
00:39:30.680So if you, you then take the next step and say, okay, the most basic Christian confession
00:39:40.840is Jesus is Lord. Now that was itself an inescapably political statement because the
00:39:49.100de facto confession of the Roman Empire is Caesar is Lord. But let's move it to a current context.
00:39:56.720What is Jesus Lord of? And I'll give you a hint. It's a three-letter word that rhymes with call.
00:40:06.520Okay. Now, we say this in our hymns. We sing this in our hymns all the time. You know,
00:40:11.860crown him lord of all what is not included in all right well i think you're absolutely right and i
00:40:20.020think the problem is that the american evangelical modern church has has um has pushed jesus lordship
00:40:27.420all the way back to to exclusively the realm of the heart jesus is lord of we've replaced all i
00:40:33.300think you're right we still do have some of those those hymns and some of that language he's lord of
00:40:37.460all, but you see it quickly eroding away that Jesus is Lord of all language and being replaced
00:40:43.120with Jesus is the Lord of my heart. And so Jesus is like his lordship, you know, it's very, very
00:40:49.840limited and it's a private, right? Lord of my heart, it's internal, it's invisible, like it's
00:40:54.540a private lordship rather than a public. And it's crazy. It's scary to see that Lord of all replaced
00:41:02.620with Lord of my heart. Yeah, there are two observations to make here. One of them
00:41:10.340is that this is effectively secularizing the gospel. In secularization, there are a variety
00:41:19.940of definitions of it, but basically it says that religion is a private matter. You're welcome to
00:41:26.840have it if you want to, but keep it out of public life. If our concept of Christianity is it's just
00:41:33.320about personal salvation, maybe personal morality, we have secularized the gospel. We have bought
00:41:40.600into the lie of secular culture. We have ceded territory that belongs to Jesus to the secular
00:41:47.400world. The second observation is that it really reflects a utterly defective view of salvation.
00:41:56.840we think of salvation, and this is a problem with evangelicals across the board,
00:42:02.860we think of salvation pretty much exclusively in terms of forgiveness of sins.
00:42:07.780We've got a very forensic legal understanding of what salvation is. That is really, really
00:42:15.900important, and I don't want to downplay the significance of that, but it's only the beginning.
00:42:23.920if you go to europe and you go in go to a gothic cathedral in france let's say charles or
00:42:32.280ramps or well it can't do notre dame anymore but if you were to go there what you would find
00:42:39.520is the main door to the west has got boatloads of symbolism attached to it it's to the west
00:42:48.160which is where the sun sets so it's symbolic of the end of the world and when you enter from the
00:42:53.180west, you're entering from the end of time, and over the main door, you will see Christ enthroned
00:42:59.400in heaven, either the scene from Revelation 4 or Christ judging people, you know, the final
00:43:06.660judgment. That's what's over the door, and so when you go in there, there's a lot of theology
00:43:12.480right on that door, and you could spend a lot of time at the west door, at the vestibule in there,
00:43:20.460looking at everything there and studying it. But if you want to get to the real jaw-dropping part
00:43:27.860of a Gothic cathedral, you've got to get inside into the nave, into the main body of the church.
00:43:33.840That is where you will be absolutely awestruck at what they did and how they managed to do this.
00:43:40.660It's breathtakingly beautiful. It's amazing stuff. The cathedral is the kingdom.
00:43:47.700getting your sins forgiven is the doorway evangelicals are stuck at the door
00:43:55.640they never or very few of them go all the way in to see the real glories of the kingdom to see the
00:44:04.900real glories of the church it's like being stuck at the west door like i said it's great it's
00:44:09.560interesting it's fascinating lots of good theology and all of that but you're missing the best part
00:44:15.560if that's where you leave it that's really good it makes me think i i love pilgrim's progress it
00:44:22.280makes me think of the wicked gate and if pilgrim had just stopped there and you know goodwill thrust
00:44:27.240his hand and you know you know with all my heart are you welcome you know are you willing to to
00:44:31.640welcome me with all my heart and if he had just you know grabbed his hand stepped inside sat down
00:44:38.440and called it done you know it'd be kind of a boring a boring book i mean still from the
00:44:43.960city of destruction the slew of the spawn you know and you know all there would still be a lot
00:44:48.900you're right we could fascinate ourselves and delve into a lot of good theology and
00:44:53.200still plenty of beauty um but we'd be missing we'd be missing a lot we'd be missing the delectable
00:45:00.020mountains we'd be missing the celestial city we'd be missing here's here's a challenge for
00:45:06.020you and your listeners read through paul's epistles the guy we get our doctrine of
00:45:12.200justification by faith from. And notice how often he uses the phrase in Christ or with Christ.
00:45:20.700And notice all of the things that are associated with it.
00:45:25.880If you really look and you see everything that is said there, it does two things. First of all,
00:45:31.280it tells you that we have literally every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.
00:45:37.820but you know so so we have to maintain our connection to christ it's it's branches and
00:45:46.080vine image it's all of those kinds of things but what it says we have in christ is a lot more than
00:45:52.620just forgiveness of sins that's mentioned almost incidentally there is so much more riches that
00:45:59.300are involved in our salvation that we just completely miss because we do not understand
00:46:03.600the lordship of christ we've privatized it we've reduced it simply to salvation yeah i think you're
00:46:11.320right i i completely agree uh let me ask you one more question uh in our episode um there's there's
00:46:19.080a phrase that um the founders seem to be fond of saying and that you have quoted um that says that
00:46:27.420eternal vigilance is the price that we pay for our liberty. What do the founders mean by this,
00:46:33.760that eternal vigilance as the price that we pay for our liberty? And what are some specific ways
00:46:39.720kind of getting as, you know, present day, you know, speaking to our culture, our society,
00:46:47.260what are some ways that the church has failed in this eternal vigilance? What do you think?
00:46:53.960Well, once again, at this point, we're dealing with the idea of original sin.
00:47:02.240You know, the fact is, you know, as Lord Acton famously said, power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
00:47:09.160You have to constantly, eternal vigilance really involves watching what your government is doing and not letting it get too big, not letting it overstep its bounds, not letting it get too big for its britches.
00:47:22.500because government always tends toward tyranny okay that that's fundamentally what that needs
00:47:33.160we you know i see that quote used a lot but very few people really think about its implications
00:47:40.220so its implications really have to do with the fact that you can't trust people with power
00:47:44.600and what we see i i would say that we have really dropped the ball on this
00:47:52.980the church has been more than happy this is really um dating to the 60s but coming out of the
00:48:01.320golden era of liberal christianity in america which is the 1950s
00:48:06.300um the church has been very happy to subcontract at its responsibilities to the government
00:48:12.740yeah and as a result the things that the church is supposed to be doing like caring for the poor
00:48:22.300and the needy and so on are now in the hands of government and government is ill-equipped to do
00:48:29.080them but the government is more than happy to take whatever power you're willing to cede it
00:48:33.280and we have been consistently ceding power to the government let me ask you this question
00:48:38.980I just actually posted this on Facebook.
00:48:44.060When we talk about giving to Caesar what's Caesar's and giving to God what's God's, what belongs to Caesar?
00:48:51.280Does determining the time and place where we can worship belong to Caesar?
00:50:30.000The Equality Act will be a great example. Yeah. And don't underestimate the impact of the Equality Act. Ministerial exemptions will get ministers off the hook, maybe, but it won't get people who work in the church who are not ministers.
00:50:48.720It won't protect churches from being required to hire there.
00:50:52.120And it certainly won't apply to non-church Christian institutions, para-church ministries, groups like Focus on the Family, for example, or Christian colleges and universities.
00:51:08.940And even an organization like, I've got a lot of respect for Hillsdale, Grove City, these places that don't take federal funding.
00:51:15.680But it's not going to stop with federal funding. It's going to go the next step to accreditation. And if you lose accreditation, you are out of business as a college.
00:51:28.300And I can pretty well guarantee if the Equality Act passes, the accreditation agencies are going to say, OK, you have to abide by the terms of this for accreditation or you are unaccredited.
00:51:37.680unaccredited. The consequences of this are absolutely massive. And yet, given the church's
00:51:46.300track record of rolling over at every government intrusion, I don't really see them having the
00:51:53.520backbone to put up a fight. Yeah, me neither. At the same time, I am hopeful and encouraged,
00:52:01.160at least in respects to, I think that at least some Christians are starting to wake up0.82
00:52:07.500I think I well I'd see it as a winnowing you know the Lord sovereignly he prunes I think he's used0.84
00:52:13.800COVID I think he's used Black Lives Matter he's used multiple things especially in this last year0.60
00:52:19.180as his winnowing fork and separating the wheat from the chaff and I think what we found is that
00:52:23.720a lot of the numbers are our numbers and our ranks that we boasted of weren't actually there
00:52:30.280so we're working with less than perhaps we were claiming less less people than we actually thought
00:52:37.620we had but the ones that we do have the remnant if you will is is waking up and and getting I
00:52:45.740think I think angry and a righteous anger so I'm hopeful but we need we need voices we need guys
00:52:53.720like john knox um we need we need fighters um let let me just ask one more thing because you
00:53:00.780just got me thinking with you know the church caring for the poor and you know if the church
00:53:05.760you know any of these spheres autonomous you know sphere sovereignty if any of these spheres fails
00:53:10.140and its responsibilities its its duties then there's always going to be the temptation of
00:53:15.080another sphere to to encroach and to step in and government tends to be that sphere
00:53:19.060what about though i just the the thing that's difficult so like caring for the poor you know
00:53:25.280the the church has so we have some pretty clear conditions that god gives us in his word you know
00:53:32.820like i mean i think of just first timothy 5 you know it's like care for the poor and and the first
00:53:37.900implicit question is who's the poor you know and and then what we see in first timothy 5 and i'm
00:53:42.840not saying that this is you know because we can obviously look at other texts and old testament
00:53:46.240text and but first timothy five you know you know uh a widow and and and to make the widow's list
00:53:53.180now to be fair if paul says you know galatians do as often as you have opportunity to do good to all
00:53:57.440but but prioritize the household of faith and and but then you know first timothy five it's like0.87
00:54:02.300here are the qualifications for a widow she must be you know he gives an age limit she must be this0.98
00:54:06.420old you know it doesn't count if she's the 30 year old woman uh 30 30 year old widow but she1.00
00:54:11.700needs to be this age. She also needs to be faithful. We don't just give to people who are0.99
00:54:16.180needy, but we do as often as we have opportunity, but we're not limitless. We're finite in our
00:54:24.840resources, and the church is finite, just like the government and everything else. We can't just,
00:54:28.880the government doesn't know it's finite, but it is, but it just prints money. And the church
00:54:33.520is finite also like the government, but tends to know it maybe a little bit better than the
00:54:37.640government. And so there's only so much, and so we prioritize. We have these regulations from
00:54:41.620God's word. And so I just think about the masses that the population, the people, when you have
00:54:46.600two entities, two spheres, and one is rightly instituted by God to care for the poor. And one
00:54:53.960is not, namely the government. But this one that actually it is their right has stipulations and
00:54:59.160conditions. And then this one says, no conditions, we won't give you a drug test, we won't give you
00:55:07.960anything, you don't have to, you don't have to live a holy life, you don't have to do this,
00:55:10.660you don't have to do that. And we'll just, you know what I mean? People, so part of it,
00:55:14.660I think the church fails, but part of it is like our, our constitute all these, you know,
00:55:19.180written for a moral population. And the more that morality, you know, erodes in the population as a
00:55:24.960whole, it's like, even if the church steps up its game and is caring for the poor righteously,
00:55:29.900according to God's word and rightly prioritizing, because it is finite. If somebody's immoral
00:55:38.980and they look at government will give me money
00:56:06.580And God expects us to do the same thing. So when you look at the history of the church, the church has taken care of the poor. It has worked at various times to distinguish between the worthy poor and the unworthy poor, and to support particularly the worthy poor, but not the others.
00:56:28.180I mean, so there have been distinctions drawn there. But the other thing to keep in mind is that I don't know the current numbers, but a while ago I ran into statistics that said that charitable organizations use 70% of their income for the work that they're doing.
00:56:50.780the government uses 30 percent because there's so much overhead so what that means is it is
00:57:00.300economically inefficient to work through the government because the government is ill-equipped
00:57:05.480to do this it's not what it's supposed to be doing christianity also along with the church
00:57:12.100it's also worth noting that christianity created the first charitable institutions in world history
00:57:19.560so there are people had always given alms to the poor but organized systematic hospitals
00:57:28.560orphanages things like this are the invention of the christian church so it doesn't have to be the
00:57:35.960church itself that is doing the work there is plate there is space for these kinds of charitable
00:57:43.540institutions. And that is still often the work that we talk about. But it still is often the
00:57:50.160work of the church in the sense that it is Christians who truly care about that. That's
00:57:57.820helpful. That's helpful. Yeah. So, you know, we have Catholic hospitals, Catholic charities,
00:58:02.360you know, things like that is one example. But there are also other denominations that do similar
00:58:06.820kinds of things. Catholics get a lot of press because they're big. But there are others that
00:58:30.960If you feel so inclined and you're one of our listeners today and you'd like to support this ministry so that we could produce and create more content like this with biblically qualified guests like Glenn Sunshine, we need your prayers and we need your support.
00:58:46.300And as an incentive and our gift to you is we are creating a bonus reel of content that only our club members, our responders can access.
00:58:54.900And so this is our bonus question for our responders, our club members.
00:58:58.460I'm going to go ahead and say it just to whet everyone's appetite, to throw out a little
01:00:08.940All of those are good ways to find me.
01:00:10.940In terms of prayer, I'm actually retiring from my position at the university at the end of this semester.
01:00:18.060And I'm retiring specifically so that I can put more focused time in teaching, writing, and speaking to the Christian world. I want to, I really believe God is calling me into more active and direct ministry, and I can't do that with a full-time job at the university.
01:00:39.700so um i'm kind of stepping out of the boat here um so uh prayer for future ministry opportunities
01:00:51.700and frankly not to be too crass about it for support um maybe some ministry opportunities
01:00:59.620that pay yeah yeah there you go so those would be some uh the most important prayer items for
01:01:06.800me currently great okay well uh glenn thank you so much for coming on the show it's an honor to
01:01:12.400get to speak to you and i've benefited you know before this evening getting to speak to you face
01:01:17.700to face i've benefited from your ministry um especially the theology podcast i forgot that
01:01:22.460you were on that um so before we started recording but then i you know remember that and that's that's
01:01:27.420one of my favorite podcasts so thank you so much for coming on the show and everything that you do