09 October 2023
None of this is new, but comments suggest it bears a review. Sorry, but this will be long.
Violent resistance to human governments is not forbidden by covenant law; it is by doctrine discouraged. The question of taking up resistance in any particular context rests in your convictions, but in order to avoid hasty foolishness, we should school our minds to react appropriately in the heat of the moment. That means you should rehearse in your mind scenarios you see others facing and decide how you would act in that context. You'll have the advantage of praying now before you encounter the next stress test.
I'm not going to cite all the chapters and verses; you'll need to have read the Bible a few times to recognize any references. That's the Hebrew way of doing things.
Right up until the Cross, Jesus promoted the necessity of not opposing those duly anointed under Covenant Law. Once He was finished, the Covenant nation was ended, finished. There would never again be an anointed ruler among humans. However, the next mention of the matter comes from Paul, most notably in Romans 13.
As I've noted often enough that chapter ends with the teaching that you really don't owe anything to any human government that is not already covered by agape (sacrificial love). More to the point, the shepherd's affection for the flock comes first, and then the compassion for outsiders. If you fulfill this, you have no further responsibility to whatever humans might demand.
Notice how Paul carried out his own teaching. In dealing with the Sanhedrin, he took advantage of Roman imperial policy to get his case removed from their hands. By this, he chose his allegiance. When it came time for the Roman government to arrest him again a few years later under Nero's persecution, he decided not to flee custody. His testimony to the Body of Christ was more important than his life.
Not once does Scripture condemn those who choose to flee any particular human authority. Rather, you must act by conviction within the context. Jesus taught His disciples in Matthew 24 to flee if they could from the coming Roman siege on Jerusalem. Meanwhile, the early church hid from the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem after Christ ascended.
His warning to Peter about that big knife he swung in the Garden of Gethsemane was an ancient proverb: "Those who live by the sword will perish by the sword." The meaning of that parable is that you are either a professional soldier or you aren't. Choose one or the other. Peter was not called to be a soldier, so he should put that thing away. When things get ugly, a soldier's life is already forfeited. Peter was needed for other work. He thus lived long enough to be executed at about the same time as Paul.
The Covenant of Moses was folded into the Covenant of Christ. The first no longer stands on its own. Moreover, for those who do not come from a Jewish background, the code of Noah applies, whereas Moses never applied to Gentiles. Even under Moses, those who did not convert and join the nation of Israel could become feudal vassals of Israel via Noah. The whole point was ritual purity and not defiling the land and people.
So, in Christ, our law code is Noah. This law code does not have a provision for anointed rulers. Instead, we fall under a much more ancient code of knowing when and where to resist, and by what means, when our government demands sin. That ancient code indicates ways we can respond to such a confrontation.
The preferred options are to hide or flee. The next preferred option is a form of demonstrative resistance, wherein you face penalties in ways that represent the gospel message. Next comes martyrdom. Finally, when all of that turns up unsupported by your convictions, we come to violent resistance. You may find yourself in the place of Ehud assassinating the corpulent warlord of Moab.
If you represent a covenant community, then your case is doctrinally much stronger. Your first duty is to shepherd the flock. A covenant community is bigger than your nuclear family household. If all you have is your spouse and minor children, then it's not a covenant community yet. There is a case for defending your family, but it's not as strong as a covenant community.
Finally, if you are a lone individual, you would frankly have a very weak case for using violence. Not least is the obvious caveat that you can far more easily escape any threats. Only if you sense a very strong conviction of dominion over a non-covenant community do you have a better justification.
And all of that is nothing more than the code reasoning about such things. You still must rely on conviction first and foremost. Should your sense of duty to Christ drive you to choose violence, then the same biblical code leaves the door wide open to a broad range of options that most westerners don't recognize. Western chivalry is pagan, not from Scripture.
There are specific orders of battle if you will. The same convictions that drive you to fight will also drive you to draw boundaries on means and methods. However, more broadly, no human life is sacred. Women and children are not off-limits. Further, the Bible does permit that death be terrifying for the victims in some situations. So-called terrorism is not a sin in itself. The Bible recognizes the utility of psychological warfare.
Never, ever parlay with sinners. What they want has no bearing on things. What drives you to battle is an unrelenting demand for some boundary, literal or symbolic. A proper cause of war is the demise of certain people, whose presence has the same effect as the "giants" of the Old Testament. They cannot be allowed to live, period. But more often, it's a matter of seeking to change bad policy: There are certain things you will not surrender to someone else's control.
Because of the starkness of purpose, it stands to reason you would never let them capture you alive. There may be special cases where tactics would indicate an opportunity from within captivity. However, you cannot permit the enemy, nor the Enemy, to use you for propaganda purposes. Their message must perish. Like it or not, a biblical call to war stands on a contempt for human life, theirs and ours. All the moralistic scolding in the world will not change the fundamental message of God's revelation. If you don't have the courage to detonate yourself as the last act of resistance, then you need to avoid any thoughts of going to war in the first place.
That's what Jesus was telling Peter in the Garden at His arrest. If it's time for the sword, then be ready to perish by it. Otherwise, expect God to show you some other answer. Most often, there are a whole range of better ways to get the message out.
Thus, we come to my final point: The current conflicts we face are not essentially violent warfare, but infowar. The violence is just a side-effect. The fundamental nature of the conflict is over what is true. The way of war for truth is totally different from violent combat. While the Bible had no prediction of what technology would do that kind of war, it still stands firmly on the underlying primacy of information warfare. That's the whole point of revelation in the first place.
We can extrapolate what the Bible might say if there had been networking and virtual data exchange. I'll offer my own take on that.
First and foremost: Once anything is moved to the virtual realm, no one owns anything. Virtual "property" is rightfully the property of no one and everyone. In other words, it is most certainly no sin to violate virtual copyright; it's only a commercial crime by human law, not a moral issue. If you can access it, it's rightfully yours. If you can find or craft any technology that bypasses gatekeeping, feel free. God will not condemn the act itself.
Let me be more blunt: God does not honor commercial or government secrecy. Whether the information is on a disk, tape, or hard drive in a computer, it is no sin to circumvent whatever is protecting that information. It's just a matter of tactics and technology. You should not destroy physical property nor harm people without a valid combat purpose, but the warfare of bits and bytes is wide open. And if your goal is to expose sin, by all means, hacking and cracking is fully justified in Christ.
On the other hand, with access to data (AKA, "knowledge") comes responsibility for it. You are obliged to act righteously on what you know about. Sometimes not knowing is a blessing. There is a wealth of information out there that I would do all I can to avoid knowing about it. There are things you cannot "un-see" that will torment you the rest of your life.
Now perhaps you can understand why the Radix Fidem path passes awfully close to freedom of expression activism. This isn't about the American 1st Amendment; it's not about rights. This is about an inherent duty to transmit to all the revelation of God. While we might worry about how our presentation could drive people away from the message, the content itself must go out to the audience God calls us to address. We will not hesitate to employ any technological means available to bypass censorship. We just might be called to engage in certain political activity that ensures we can get the Word out.
Should we have any standard targets for political action, or violence, it would be censors. There is no other human political issue that matters to us half so much as censorship. It's not about the money, property, family safety, etc. This is as close as we come to having a community orthodoxy.
Pray accordingly.
Comments
Dan D.
"The current conflicts we face are not essentially violent warfare, but infowar."
Infowar is how it all started for mankind, isn't it? "Did God really say..." The vehicles may have changed but not the intent, as you wrote earlier "...persuading us to choose paths, any path at all, except the one leading back to Eden."
Catacomb Resident
Yes, Dan, the Great Commission is information warfare. As long as we start with the assumption that we are ourselves the information, we can understand what we should do.
This document is public domain; spread the message.