Christian Libertarianism

“I tell Thee that man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.”

The Grand Inquisitor to Jesus ChristIn The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Western journalists chronicling the collapsing Soviet Union were counseled not to equate the rise of free-market forces as a conservative victory, since “conservative” in today’s Russian terms referred to the “old” Communist order: i.e., the rise of “progressivism” in Russia could be interpreted as a victory for Western conservatism, which had nothing to do with the conservatism of twentieth-century Russia, and which thus could not in any way be termed “conservative” in the Russian context. Different labels mean different things in different cultures and in different historical periods. Even in a particular nation and culture, labels change meanings over time. In Christian or Biblical parlance, in fact, terms like “born again,” “liberation,” even “Christian” itself have over the last few decades assumed denotations radically different from—in some cases the opposite of—what they have denoted historically. Labels are often misleading.

This is true with the expression “Christian libertarian,” whose premise I wish to elucidate and defend in this editorial. The term libertarian immediately elicits images of philosopher Ayn Rand’s individualistic objectivism, and the Austrian School of Economics’ laissez faire market orientation. We Christian reconstructionists (another label that has sometimes become a libel!) agree with much of the libertarian critique of modern statist culture without endorsing its usually secular premises. If we attach the qualifier “Christian” to the expression “libertarian,” though, we may create a valuable verbal tool for expressing our view that, in terms of the jurisdiction of human institutions, life should be lived in maximum individual freedom under God’s law. This is what I mean by “Christian libertarianism.”

Almost every secular (and, for that matter, allegedly Christian) assessment of Christian reconstruction I have ever read charges us with seeking to impose a heavy, top-down political bureaucracy on an unsuspecting democratic populace. Our true authoritarian colors are said to be revealed in a desire to stone disobedient adolescents, burn witches, and bulldoze mosques. This charge is not merely false; it is slanderous. For many years, R. J. Rushdoony has ceaselessly argued that the main government in the earth is the government of the Christian individual under God:

“The basic government is self-government, and only the Christian man is truly free and hence able properly to exercise self-government.... Second, next to self-government is another basic form of government, the family. The family is the man’s first state, church, and school.... Third, the church is a government and an important one, not only in its exercise of discipline but in its religious and moral influence on the minds of men.... Fourth, the school is a government, and a very important one.... Fifth, a man’s vocation, his business, work, profession, or calling is an important government.... Sixth, private associations are important forms of government.... Seventh, another area of government is civil government, or the state. The state is thus one government among many, and to make the state equivalent to government per se is destructive of liberty and of life. The governmental area of the state must be strictly limited lest all government be destroyed by the tyranny of one realm.”1

Of all of Rushdoony’s books, only one is devoted exclusively to the topic of the state.2 It just so happens, however, that our critics seem more interested in purveying the latest sensational gossip than in actually reading our writings. By depicting us as tyrants, they apparently wish to frighten the unwary from Biblical law and self-government. Of course, when it comes to the modern American tyranny which permits (and partly subsidizes) the butchery of millions of unborn children, which extorts nearly fifty per cent of one’s wealth in various forms of tax, which requires Christian subsidy of godless education, which conscripts our children (increasingly of both sexes) into combat, which seizes a large percentage of our inheritance designed for our covenant children, and which forbids the recitation of prayer in schools or manger scenes on state-government lawns, our critics are often strangely silent. Apparently they prefer the tyranny of man’s law to the freedom of God’s law, and obviously God has granted their preference.

The reason statists (and the most public critics of Christian reconstruction are usually either statists or broadly socialistic, “Christian” or otherwise) so misinterpret and slander Christian reconstruction is that they cannot understand how it is possible to work for social change without first harnessing the centralized political machine. Because they are dedicated to the state as the prime vehicle of social change, they assume anybody who wants to change society must primarily execute a political agenda. This is a grievously erroneous assumption. In the Christian scheme, political change is the result, not the cause, of social change. Men are regenerated by the preaching of the gospel of the word of God and operation of the Holy Spirit, by whose power they begin to re-order their lives, their families, their vocations, and all other areas of endeavor, by God’s revealed word. This reorientation leads, in turn, to increased godliness and obedience in society, adherence to God’s law. Consequently, God’s law prevails in the political sphere. In other words, by the time godly transformation reaches the political stage, the process of Christianization is almost complete.

Christian reconstructionists accent individual responsibility under God and therefore individual freedom under God. In only limited and extreme cases may the state interfere in this individual government. Likewise, the church’s intervention in this government is severely limited. Further, the role of parents is to nurture children into this godly self-government and then, apart from godly counsel (Pr. 1:1-9 and passim), maintain a “hands-off” policy. While the individual remains subject to intermediate authorities,3 the role of those authorities is, in the case of the church and state, to maintain and enforce Biblically expressed—and no other—obedience suitable to their particular spheres, and, in the case of the family, to train children into self-government leading to that obedience.

This, in summary, is the meaning of Christian libertarianism.4

Christian Libertarianism in the State

The state is bound to enforce the law-word of God appropriate to its sphere. It is a minister of God (Rom. 13:1-5);5 it may not transgress its divinely imposed limits.6 It may not enforce civil law not expressed in Holy Scripture. This is as much as to say that the state may not legislate. The only valid role of legislatures in a state circumscribed by Biblical limits is to establish laws deduced from Biblical revelation as applicable to the modern situation (it may not establish laws merely on the grounds that they are not at variance with Biblical revelation). That such a suggestion may occasion controversy indicates the extent to which modern society has capitulated to statism—that is, the autonomous rule of the state, and its eventual attempt to swallow up every sphere of life. The state was never intended by God to legislate in all matters on which the Bible does not speak, not even provided such legislation does not contradict Scripture itself. The state is bound to enforce only the criminal sanctions of the written law of God.

The state may not enforce what the Bible does not require in the civil sphere. For this reason the king of Israel was enjoined to read the entire book of the law (Dt. 17:18- 20); he was to be intimately acquainted with the text of written revelation. The Bible is the civil magistrate’s ultimate legal code. It does not give him wide legislative latitude, for it posits relatively few criminal acts. Most sins are not crimes in the Bible. As an obvious example, covetousness, lust, tail-bearing, idolatry in the heart, and heresy are serious sins, but the civil magistrate is not empowered to punish them. His hands are tied by the limits of the explicit and implicit instructions of Scripture. Economic inequalities may tear at our hearts and elicit charitable responses, but the state may not attempt to enforce those responses. The ignorance of vast sectors of a nation or society may seem to clamor for the institution of schools, but the state may not be the agent of that institution. Citizens may unwisely neglect to invest their wealth for their retirement or older years, but the state may not seize (or require employers to seize) wealth from citizens’ income to invest for their retirement.

It is essential to recall that the state is a ministry of justice, not of benevolence. The church is a ministry, among other things, of benevolence (Rom. 15:26); the family is the prime ministry of benevolence (1 Tim. 5:16). But the state is not the church or the family. Because in recent decades the family and church have lost their virility and abandoned their responsibility, an omnicompetent state has rushed into the vacuum to serve as the citizens’ family (“Big Brother”!) and church. The family and church must reassume the tasks (e.g., health, education, welfare, charity, discipline) today delinquently ceded to the state. Christian libertarianism posits that state government may interfere in other governments only on few, specifically delineated occasions.

It is paramount to understand, notwithstanding, that Christian libertarians do not endorse civil anarchy: the state does have a legitimate role to fill. It must enforce the inscripturated law appropriate to its sphere. For example, it must suppress murder, theft, rape, blasphemy, etc.7 It may not, however, suppress sins God has left to his own (or to some other sphere’s) retribution. The state may not criminalize what the Bible does not depict as a criminal offense, nor may the state assume responsibilities beyond what the Bible enjoins.

Christian Libertarianism in the Church

Similarly, the jurisdiction of church leadership is strictly circumscribed by Scripture. Church leadership is warned that the flock constitutes God’s possession: church leaders are forbidden to “overlord” the flock in their calling as its and as Christ’s servants (1 Pet. 5:1-3; cf. Mk. 10:42-45). Members are required to obey the duly constituted authority of church leadership (Heb. 13:7, 17), but the latter may not impose requirements beyond the prescriptions of or deductions from Scripture (1 Tim. 4:12-16; 2 Tim. 3:16, 17). Ministerially, church leadership is to feed the flock by the word of God (Ac. 20:28); jurisdictionally, it is to lead the flock by the word of God (1 Pet. 5:2). No more than may a minister preach other than expositional sermons in his ministerial capacity8 may he and the other church leadership in their jurisdictional capacity dictate policy not anchored in Scripture.9 Though referring specifically to the topic of worship, Calvin expressed the Christian libertarian position in the church most cogently. While perhaps permitting excessive latitude for human legislation, he nonetheless captures the correct orientation to the issue of jurisdiction and freedom in the church:

“Whatever edicts have been issued by men respecting the worship of God, independently of his word, it has been customary to call human traditions. Against such laws we contend, and not against the holy and useful constitutions of the Church, which contribute to the preservation of discipline, or integrity, or peace. The object for which we contend, is, to restrain that overgrown and barbarous empire, which is usurped over men’s souls by those who wish to be accounted the pastors of the Church, but who in reality are its most savage butchers.... I only contend for this one point, that no necessity ought to be imposed upon consciences in things in which they [Christians] have been set at liberty in Christ....They must acknowledge Christ their deliverer as their only King, and must be governed by one law of liberty, even the sacred word of the gospel, if they wish to retain the grace which they have obtained in Christ; they must submit to no slavery; they must be fettered by no bonds.”10

There is doubtless some truth to the charge that the reformers were somewhat inconsistent in, on the one hand, decrying Rome’s addition to the Scriptures while, on the other, imposing no less extra-Biblical additions in the church themselves. Nonetheless, the inner principle of Protestantism demands the conclusion of Christian libertarianism in the church.

The notion, sometimes expressed, sometimes implied, that the role of church leadership is to legislate on all matters the Bible does not address is an antinomian tyrant’s fairy tale. In the mid-70s I heard a fundamentalist minister in Mississippi declare, “If the pastor tells a member he can use only white-walled tires on his car, the member is under Biblical obligation to obey.” Frankly, it is difficult to conceive a more contemptible, sacrilegious assertion. Likewise, a noted reconstructionist informed me of a church that excommunicated a member for committing adultery in his heart. To the rejoinder, “But these are extreme examples,” I counter, “How in principle can one argue against such tyranny if he permits church leadership to legislate in the church?”

It is not given to church leadership to devise new ecclesiastical laws, whether ostensibly derived from “prophetic utterance,” “nearness to the bosom of God,” “common sense,” “canon law,” “Holy-Spirit leading,” or “denominational policy.” It is given to church leadership to govern the flock according to nothing other than the inscripturated word of God (Tit. 1:9; 1 Pet. 4:11; cf. Dt. 4:1, 2). Beyond inscripturated revelation, ecclesiastical leadership is not authorized to dictate. Ecclesiastics who wish to legislate rather than govern in the church sphere are no less culpable than statists who wish to legislate rather than govern in the civil sphere (it is puzzling that some support Christian libertarianism in the state but broad, extra-Scriptural legislation in the church). We don’t need legislation beyond Holy Scripture (in its explications and implications); we need greater obedience to Holy Scripture.

Too often, ecclesiastics mimic the United States Supreme court, whose members have employed their post to legislate rather than to interpret the Constitution.11No man may legislate for God; he may only interpret and apply the Holy Scripture appropriate to his sphere.12

To those who query, “But if elders may not legislate, why are they needed at all? Does it not then suffice for each individual Christian to obey the Bible,” there are two answers. First, authority and jurisdiction are not the only, nor even the prime, tasks of church leadership. Leaders are called first and preeminently to instruct their congregation in the Scriptures (Tim. 4:2; Tit. 1:9; Eph. 4:11-13). The elders’ chief role is edification, not jurisdiction. Second, jurisdiction in certain matters (notably public, but non- criminal, law-breaking) not given by God to the state rests with the church. The family is not always in a position to curb visible, but non-criminal, sins like divisiveness, heresy, slander, drunkenness, etc., especially when committed by the husband or father. The church does exercise legitimate jurisdiction in such matters.

Further, it is sometimes necessary for church leadership to deal with certain members in a more comprehensive fashion than outlined above. Stunted Christian growth or carnality require a more “intrusive” role by church leadership (1 Cor. 3:2, 3; Heb. 5:11-14). Church members who act as children, thereby forfeiting their responsible freedom, may of necessity be treated as spiritual children in the church. It is imperative to recognize, however, that this is an abnormal and undesirable situation: church leadership dedicated to keeping the congregation in perpetual tutelage concedes the low spiritual state of their congregation. As an example, church leadership may prohibit a member formerly a drunkard from using wine in communion (though the use of wine is plainly normative in the sacrament) until the member by the Spirit of God has conquered his drunkenness. The point, however, is that this aberration should be rectified quickly.

Moreover, Scripture requires the Christian to limit his freedom if its exercise injures the conscience of his weaker brother (Rom. 14; 1 Cor. 8). This refers not to mere disagreement, or to subordination to the whims of Pharisees, but to the harm of the conscience of actual brothers.13 Nonetheless, the goal again of church leadership is to urge the weaker and immature brethren to greater maturity and thus freedom in the Faith.

In addition, it is crucial to note that Christian libertarianism in the church in no way precludes godly counsel or advice from church leadership (or other presumably responsible, mature individuals; see Pr. 20:18), even if that advice is not expressed or implied in Scripture. Christian libertarianism does not prevent the rendering of trans-Biblical advice or counsel by church leadership, only trans-Biblical jurisdiction, authority, and discipline.

Again, it must be emphasized that Christian libertarians no more support anarchy in the church than they do in the state. Church leadership is compelled by God to prohibit what God’s word prohibits in the ecclesiastical sphere. Churches today are replete with antinomianism, and any elder who refuses to take steps of church discipline against contumacious adulterers, slanderers, non-communicants, drunkards, liars, and other visible, unrepentant members, is betraying his calling. He may not, though, demand of the church membership what the Holy Scripture does not demand of them; he may not legislate where the Holy Spirit has not legislated in the Scriptures.

Jurisdictionally, then, the church is no less limited by the explicit and implicit injunctions of the word of God than the state.

Christian Libertarianism in the Family

The case of the family is somewhat, though not entirely, different from that of the state and church. The goal of parents is to nurture their children in the Faith with the result that their seed graduates from tutelage and becomes mature adults (Gal. 4:1, 2; 1 Cor. 13:11). Children’s freedom is restricted because they are mentally, emotionally, and physically incapable of exercising the responsibilities of freedom. Parents impose discipline with the goal of forming in children self-discipline. Sensible parents do not wish for their children to remain forever at home; parents train children to start new marital covenants (Gen. 2:23, 24). Indeed, when we see adult children living for extended periods at their parents’ home, we detect an abnormality: divorce, marital separation, death to a spouse, or simply overprotective parents or overdependent children. Perpetual tutelage of children is a disgrace and a concession to parental failure. Our parental goal is, by God’s grace, to raise up of our covenant seed free individuals under God.

While the wife’s formal freedom is limited by her submission to her husband and while her relation to her husband is not analogous to the citizen’s relationship to the civil magistrate or the church member’s relationship to the church leadership,14 the Christian wife nonetheless enjoys maximum freedom under God’s law. Since her relation to her husband is of his bone and of his flesh (Eph. 5:28-31), she participates in his freedom.

Not Anarchy, but Obedience

Christian libertarianism is not equivalent to anarchy. The state, the church, and the family are legitimate, divinely ordained orders. The role of the individual is to obey duly constituted authority, not to overturn that authority. Christian libertarianism does not furnish warrant for insurrection or revolution. The tyranny of an unjust state or an unjust church (or an unjust family, for that matter) does not justify insurrection. In the state we often can work by means of legitimate channels to alter the injustice. If there are no channels (for example, in a totalitarianism or dictatorship), we must appeal directly to the sovereign God and wait patiently for his justice. In the church too we can follow valid channels of adjudication, and if they prove unfruitful, we can transfer to another congregation. Children and wives can appeal to the church and the state in clear cases of tyranny they suffer from husbands or parents, respectively. Further, the fact that the state or church implements a law or regulation beyond the explication or implication of Holy Scripture (and thus transgresses the limits of its authority) gives no warrant for Christian’s disobedience. Christians are required to “submit [themselves] to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake” (1 Pet. 2:13). The state’s or church’s disobedience does not justify the Christian’s disobedience. Of course, I refer to phenomena the Bible neither requires nor forbids. No Christian may obey the state, church—or any other mediate authority—when it requires what the Bible forbids or forbids what the Bible requires (Ac. 5:29).15

In any sphere and situation, we must meet injustice with justice, not with another injustice; and insurrection and revolution are clearly injustices. The task of Christians under the authority of intrusive or tyrannical orders (if they cannot validly leave the jurisdiction of those orders) is to work within legitimate channels to change those orders, bringing them under the authority of Christ’s law-word, thus limiting their jurisdiction to God’s written revelation.

The Responsibility and Fear of Freedom

The presupposition of Christian libertarianism is that God permits great human freedom. To be sure, all human freedom is not only ethically but also metaphysically circumscribed by the absolute predestinating hand of God (Christian libertarians are no existentialists). Man’s freedom, like every other dimension of his existence, is derivative. However, as the Westminster Confession of Faith observes, “Although, in relation to the foreknowledge and decree of God, the first cause, all things come to pass immutably and infallibly; yet, by the same providence, he ordereth them to fall out according to the nature of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently” (Ch. 5, Sec. 2). Men’s choices are one example of “second causes,” and one of man’s (frequent) choices is sin. God grants man the freedom (though never the permission) to sin.

This infuriates Pharisaic autocrats, whether statists, ecclesiocrats, or parental tyrants. They are not content to enforce the law of God appropriate to their sphere’s jurisdiction; they must obliterate all sin (real or imagined). The pledge of God’s direct judgment on sin in both time and eternity is not sufficient for them; they must be God’s choice avenger in all things. If they are statists, they must outlaw or greatly curb smoking, jaywalking, and private property. If they are ecclesiastics, they must forbid attending amusement parks, missing Wednesday “prayer meetings,” and drinking alcoholic beverages. If they are tyrannical parents, they must exact rigid, unquestioning obedience of their teenage and even adult children (violating Eph. 6:4). For these avenging angels, the pure, infallible word of God is never enough. They must supplement the written word of revelation with their own tentative but arrogant word of revelation. They are at war with God’s created order and his inscripturated revelation.

The sin does not rest entirely with the authoritarians, however. God grants man great latitude and freedom under his law and jurisdiction. But many men do not like freedom; some actually fear it. They surrender it willingly to external human authorities, usually the state, and often the church. They deserve to be treated as slaves because they possess a slave mentality. They disobey the Scriptures and become servants of men (I Cor. 7:23). God therefore permits them to suffer the tyranny of unjust men. As a pastor, I once had a very strong-willed church member tell me, “l hate you because you give too much freedom in the church.” She lusted for ecclesiastical slavery. Those who lust for slavery usually get their lust fulfilled. That they subsequently complain about their slavery exhibits their double-minded hypocrisy.

By contrast, we Christian libertarians can so forcefully stress freedom under God’s law because we believe so forcefully in God’s operation and providence in history. We hold one main reason it is not necessary for the state and church to obliterate all sin in society is that God reserves to himself judgment for most sins. He is historically active in his work of judgment. He does not commit most judgment into the hands of man (Rom. 12:19). Perhaps God does not allow men to avenge most sins because he does not wish for man to be tempted to play God (sinful man already has an innate problem with that temptation; Gen. 3:5). One thing is certain: most sins may not be punished by any human institution or agency—God reserves judgment to himself. Tyrants in both state and church naturally resent this intrusion into their authoritarian agenda, but it is doubtful God will soon change his mind.

In the words of the Chalcedon ministry statement, therefore, Christian libertarianism, following Christian orthodoxy, “sets limits on all authoritarian human institutions by acknowledging the validity of the claims of the One who is the true source of human freedom (Gal. 5:1).” No man or human institution—be it Pope, father, king, elder, president, nation, business—may arrogate the authority inherent in God alone.

The principal government in the earth is the self- government of the Christian under God’s authority, expressed and mediated in the inscripturated word. He may not surrender this government to mere man: “And the servant abideth not in the house forever: but the Son abideth ever. If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” Jn. 8:35, 36).

1. Rousas J. Rushdoony, Politics of Guilt and Pity (Fairfax, VA [1970] 1978), 331, 332.

2. dem., Christianity and the State (Vallecito, CA, 1986).

3. This essay presumes the correctness of the Calvinistic notion of sphere sovereignty. See Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids, 1931), 79 and passim. The three principal spheres are the family, church, and state, each interrelated but not equated, and each subject directly to divine jurisdiction. Sphere sovereignty forbids the union of any of these spheres, and the subordination or assimilation of one by another.

4. It is essential to differentiate Christian libertarianism from the liberal justification of individual freedom: “The modern or liberal idea of freedom emerges with the attribution of rights of the mere individual against those in authority over him. By the mere individual we mean the individual considered apart from any specific social role,” John Piamenatz, “Liberalism,” in ed., Philip P. Wiener, Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York, 1973), 3:36. Christian libertarianism, like the Bible itself, is not concerned with abstract individual “rights,” but with godly freedom and obedience in a covenantal context. For an explanation of the relation between covenantal theology and individual political freedom, see Charles S. McCoy and J. Wayne Baker, Fountainhead of Federalism (Louisville, 1991).

5. Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics (Phillipsburg, NJ, 1984 ed.), 317-472. Bahnsen addresses freedom under God’s law in the state, but unfortunately, not in the church.

6. Owen Fourie, “The State Reduced to its Biblical Limits,” in ed., Andrew Sandlin, A Comprehensive Faith (San Jose, 1996), 193- 200.

7. See R.J. Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law (no loc., 1973).

8. John Stott, “Biblical Preaching is Expository Preaching,” in ed., Kenneth S. Kantzer, Evangelical Roots (Nashville, 1978), 159-169.

9. It is not in any sense implied that the ecumenical creeds and Reformation confessions may not exert subordinate authority in the church, since we consider the doctrine they posit nothing more than valid deductions from Holy Scripture. No one may employ Holy Scripture to overturn orthodoxy. See Andrew Sandlin, “Orthodoxy,” Calvinism Today, Vol. III, No. 4 [October, 1993], 21-25, 32.

10. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. John Allen (Grand Rapids, 1949), Bk.4, Ch. 10, Sec. 1, emphasis in original.

11. Robert H. Bork, The Tempting of America (New York, 1990).

12. Andrew Sandlin, “Hermeneutical Activism,” Chalcedon Report, July, 1992, 9-14.

13. For a masterly treatment of this subject, see Calvin, op. cit., Bk. 3, Ch. 19.

14. The absolute Biblical analogy is that of Christ and the church, to that of the husband and the wife (Eph. 5:25-33).

15. In addition, an individual may bind himself by a vow, e.g., to obey another individual (Ex. 21:1-6), but the making of such a vow is strictly voluntary. A woman makes such an oath when she marries: she will obey her husband in all matters not contrary to Holy Scripture. In most cases, for a free Christian man to make such an oath to the state or church leadership is hazardous and contemptible.