Devotional 105: The Abuse of Liberty: Those Who Pretend Liberty to Cover Sin

The Confession Read

And because the powers which God hath ordained, and the liberty which Christ hath purchased, are not intended by God to destroy, but mutually to uphold and preserve one another; they who, upon pretence of Christian liberty, shall oppose any lawful power, or the lawful exercise of it, whether it be civil or ecclesiastical, resist the ordinance of God. And, for their publishing of such opinions, or maintaining of such practices, as are contrary to the light of nature, or to the known principles of Christianity (whether concerning faith, worship, or conversation), or to the power of godliness; or, such erroneous opinions or practices, as either, in their own nature, or in the manner of publishing or maintaining them, are destructive to the external peace and order which Christ hath established in the church; they may lawfully be called to account, and proceeded against, by the censures of the church, or by the power of the civil magistrate.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 20, Section 4

Introduction

Every great truth, when severed from its companion truths, becomes a lie. This is one of the most hard-won and costly lessons in the history of the church, and it is the lesson that the Westminster Divines seal into the final section of their chapter on Christian liberty. Section 1 unfurled the vast scope of what Christ purchased; Section 2 established that God alone is Lord of the conscience; Section 3 warned with apostolic gravity that liberty is never a license to sin. But now Section 4 confronts a temptation more subtle than antinomian license and more seductive than Roman tyranny: the temptation to mistake liberty for anarchy, to imagine that because Christ has set the conscience free, every human authority, civil and ecclesiastical alike, has been rendered null. The Divines had witnessed where that reasoning led. In Münster, radical reformers had seized a city and drowned it in blood. In England, groups of enthusiasts claimed that the Spirit's inward leading exempted them from the authority of magistrates and ministers alike. The cry "Christian liberty" became a battering ram swung against the gates of every institution God had ordained for the preservation of order: the family, the church, the commonwealth. Against this chaos, the Divines planted Section 4 not as a retreat from liberty but as a defense of it. True liberty, they insisted, and lawful authority are not enemies. They are sisters, both daughters of the same Father, both purchased by the same Christ, both ordained for the same end: the flourishing of the people of God in this present evil age. The logic of the section is as careful as a surveyor's chain. It begins with a foundational principle: the powers God has ordained and the liberty Christ has purchased exist in mutual harmony. It draws a negative conclusion: whoever uses liberty as a pretense for opposing lawful power resists the ordinance of God. And it concludes with a positive application: the church and the magistrate each possess a God-given authority to call to account those who, in the name of liberty, publish opinions or maintain practices that destroy faith, godliness, or the peace of Christ's church. This is not the voice of a frightened establishment but of pastors who had buried friends killed by both tyranny and anarchy. They knew that liberty without order devours itself, and order without liberty becomes a prison. The section stands as a permanent witness that the gospel creates neither rebels nor tyrants, but sons who honor the Father's household and citizens who render to Caesar what is Caesar's, not because they are slaves, but because they are free.

Scripture Foundation

The relationship between Christian liberty and lawful authority is not an invention of the seventeenth century. It is a theme that runs through the whole of Scripture with the persistence of a golden thread, and the apostle Paul, more than any other New Testament writer, wove that thread into the fabric of his pastoral instruction. The foundational text for the divine origin of civil authority, and the one that most directly undergirds Section 4, is his declaration to the Romans: "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation." Romans 13:1-2. The language the Divines employ in Section 4 is nearly a quotation: "resist the ordinance of God" comes directly from Paul's pen, and it carries the weight of apostolic authority. The Greek terms Paul chooses are precise and deliberate. "Ordained" translates tetagmenai, a perfect passive participle of tassō, a verb that in classical Greek denoted the drawing up of troops in battle order, the arranging of an army under its commanders. The perfect tense indicates a completed action with ongoing force: the powers that exist have been arranged by God, and they remain arranged by God. The civil magistrate is not a random product of human ambition, a necessary evil that Christians must reluctantly tolerate. He is a divine appointment, a servant of God for the good of those under his care. The Confession's opening phrase, "the powers which God hath ordained," echoes Paul's verb with confessional precision. And the consequence Paul draws is inescapable: to resist the power is to resist the God who established it. The revolutionary who claims that Christian liberty authorizes him to overthrow the magistrate has not understood that the same God who gave him liberty also gave him the magistrate. But Paul is not naive. He writes these words to Christians living under Nero, a man who would soon bathe the city of Rome in the blood of the saints. Paul knew better than any modern critic that magistrates can be wicked, that power can be abused, that the state can become a beast. And yet he does not qualify his command. "Let every soul be subject." The subjection he commands is not an unconditional surrender of the conscience, which belongs to God alone as Section 2 has established, but a recognition of the magistrate's legitimate sphere. The believer obeys the magistrate in all things lawful, not because the magistrate is always right, but because the office is divine. The badge, however tarnished by the man who wears it, still bears the King's seal. This apostolic teaching did not originate with Paul. The Lord Jesus himself, standing before the Roman governor whose authority he could have shattered with a word, acknowledged the divine origin of civil power: "Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above." John 19:11. Pilate was a coward, a politician, and a murderer of the innocent. And yet his authority, Jesus said, was given him from above. The Son of God, facing unjust death at the hands of a corrupt official, refused to use his liberty to deny the legitimacy of the office that condemned him. If ever there was a case for Christian liberty as a warrant for revolution, it was this: the spotless Lamb before the wolf. And yet Jesus submitted — not to Pilate's wickedness, for he denounced it, but to Pilate's office, for he acknowledged its divine origin. The believer who claims that Christian liberty frees him from all obligation to the civil magistrate has not learned from his Master. The liberty of Christ is a liberty that can bow without breaking, because it knows that the One to whom it ultimately bows sits above every earthly throne. The apostolic teaching extends beyond civil government to the authority that Christ has established within his church. The writer to the Hebrews commands: "Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves: for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account, that they may do it with joy, and not with grief: for that is unprofitable for you." Hebrews 13:17. The verb translated "obey" is peithesthe, the middle voice of peithō, to persuade or to trust. It carries the sense of a willing, persuaded submission rather than a coerced compliance. And the verb "submit" is hypeikete, a term that appears nowhere else in the New Testament and that in classical usage meant to yield before a superior force. The authority of church rulers is not despotic; it is the authority of those who watch, who care, who will give an account. But it is real authority, and the believer who refuses it because he claims liberty under Christ has mistaken the shepherd's crook for the tyrant's rod. The shepherd who watches for the souls of the flock has a commission from the Chief Shepherd, and to resist that commission is to resist the Chief Shepherd himself. The apostle Peter, whose own understanding of liberty was forged in the fires of persecution, draws the threads together in a single passage that reads almost like a commentary on the Confession's fourth section. "Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme; or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well. For so is the will of God, that with well doing ye may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men: as free, and not using your liberty for a cloke of maliciousness, but as the servants of God." 1 Peter 2:13-16. The logic is remarkably coherent. Submit, Peter says, for the Lord's sake. Submit because this is the will of God. Submit as free men, not as slaves. And submit precisely so that your liberty may not become a cloke for the maliciousness that brings reproach on the gospel. The liberty of the gospel and submission to lawful authority are not in tension; they are two sides of the same coin. The believer who most fully understands his freedom is the believer who submits to every ordinance of man, not from fear of the sword, but from love of his Father's will. Yet the Scripture never permits this submission to become absolute. The apostles who commanded submission to magistrates were the same apostles who, when commanded by the Sanhedrin to cease preaching in the name of Jesus, answered: "We ought to obey God rather than men." Acts 5:29. Here is the boundary that protects liberty of conscience from being swallowed by the demands of human authority. When the civil power commands what God forbids, or forbids what God commands, the believer must disobey, not in the name of personal autonomy, but in the name of a higher allegiance. The very Peter who wrote "submit yourselves to every ordinance of man" stood before the council that had forbidden him to preach and declared that he could not comply. This is not inconsistency; it is the proper ordering of allegiances. The Confession does not teach that lawful authority is absolute; it teaches that it is lawful within its sphere, and that the sphere is bounded by the Word of God. The believer who refuses to obey a command to sin is not resisting the ordinance of God; he is honoring the God who ordained that ordinance, and who ordained it for good, not for evil.

What the Divines Meant

The immediate occasion for Section 4 was the upheaval of the 1640s, but the theological issues it addressed had been festering for more than a century. The Reformation's recovery of Christian liberty had been accompanied, almost from the beginning, by a radical wing that drew conclusions the Reformers themselves repudiated. If the believer was free from the Pope, why not from the prince? If the conscience answered to God alone, why should it answer to the magistrate? If every believer was a priest, why should any believer submit to the judgments of presbyters or synods? The logic had a certain seductive consistency, and it appealed powerfully to those who had suffered under ecclesiastical tyranny and now wished to throw off every yoke, divine and human alike. The Anabaptist kingdom of Münster in 1534-1535 was the nightmare that haunted every discussion of Christian liberty for a century afterward. A group of radical reformers seized control of the city, instituted community of goods and polygamy, and declared the old order of magistrates and churches superseded by the kingdom of the saints. The experiment ended in blood, starvation, and the utter discrediting of the gospel in the eyes of the watching world. When the Divines wrote that those who oppose lawful power "upon pretence of Christian liberty" resist the ordinance of God, they were describing a pattern they had seen repeated in every generation: liberty untethered from lawful authority becomes license, license becomes chaos, and chaos becomes a new and more terrible tyranny. But the Divines were also addressing a subtler and more enduring error: the tendency of the regenerate heart to confuse liberty from human traditions in worship (which Section 2 had defended) with liberty from all forms of church government and discipline (which Section 4 now forbids). The believer who has been taught that the pope may not bind his conscience, that councils may err, that human traditions carry no divine authority, may easily slide into the conviction that church courts have no authority at all. If a synod cannot require me to believe what Scripture does not teach, the reasoning goes, then a synod cannot require anything of me. The Divines closed this door firmly. The church that Christ established is not a voluntary association of autonomous individuals. It is a body, an ordered community, a flock under shepherds who must give account. The authority of the church to censure error and call to account those who shatter faith, godliness, or the peace of Christ's household is not a human invention but a dominical institution. Christ himself gave the keys of the kingdom to his church, and the exercise of those keys is not an infringement of Christian liberty but an expression of Christ's own lordship over the conscience. The civil magistrate's role in the section is the most contested element, and it requires careful historical understanding. The Divines were not Erastians, who believed the civil magistrate possessed authority over the church in matters spiritual. That battle had been fought and won against Rome and the Tudor-Stuart establishment. But neither were they separatists who believed the magistrate had no God-given interest in religion. The Reformed tradition had long taught that the magistrate, as God's minister, had a duty to protect true religion and to suppress public blasphemy, idolatry, and heresy, not by binding the conscience, which no human power can do, but by maintaining the external peace and order of the commonwealth. A society in which blasphemy is publicly promoted and the fundamentals of Christianity are openly attacked is a society in which the conditions for godliness are undermined. The magistrate who punishes the open publication of opinions contrary to the light of nature is not usurping Christ's throne; he is fulfilling his own office as a terror to evil works. This is not a theocratic claim. The Confession acknowledges a real but limited sphere for the civil power, bounded by the distinction between external peace and order (which the magistrate may protect) and the inward bondage of the conscience (which only God may bind). The Divines would not have recognized the modern doctrine that the state must be neutral among all religions, but neither would they have recognized the Roman claim that the state is the servant of an infallible church. They occupied a mediating position, and they occupied it because they believed that the Scriptures taught it. The language the Divines employ in describing the offenses that may be lawfully censured deserves careful attention. They do not say that every erroneous opinion may be punished. They specify four categories: opinions or practices contrary to the light of nature, to the known principles of Christianity, to the power of godliness, or destructive to the external peace and order of the church. Each category functions as a guardrail. The light of nature, that innate knowledge of right and wrong, of God's existence and moral character, which Paul describes in Romans 1 and 2, establishes a universal standard that even those who do not acknowledge Scripture may be held to. The known principles of Christianity, not every disputed point of theology, but the fundamentals of the faith, the doctrines without which Christianity ceases to be Christianity, establish a confessional boundary. The power of godliness, not the form, not the outward observance, but the inward life and experiential reality of communion with God, guards against a merely notional orthodoxy that leaves the heart untouched. And the external peace and order of the church, the unity and good government of the visible body, guards against those whose opinions or practices, whatever their claims to piety, tear the church apart. These categories are not a license for persecution; they are the careful distinctions of men who had suffered persecution and who knew the difference between binding the conscience and preserving the peace.

Theological Depth

The Reformed tradition's teaching on the relationship between liberty and authority reaches its classic formulation in Calvin's treatment of civil government and church discipline. In the final chapters of the Institutes, Calvin insists that the magistrate's authority is real, divinely ordained, and genuinely binding on the Christian conscience, not in the sense that the magistrate can create new moral obligations before God, but in the sense that the magistrate's lawful commands are to be obeyed for conscience's sake, because the office itself is from God. The believer who defies the magistrate in matters within the magistrate's lawful sphere sins not only against the state but against the God who established the state. Yet Calvin is equally insistent that the magistrate's authority has limits. When the magistrate commands what God forbids, the believer must disobey, not violently, not seditiously, but with the calm resolve of Daniel, who opened his windows toward Jerusalem and prayed to his God, knowing that the lions' den awaited him. Calvin's treatment of church discipline is, if anything, even more pointed. He writes that the discipline of the church is the "sinews" by which the members of the body hold together, and that the removal of discipline is the removal of the church's life. The keys of the kingdom, with the authority to bind and loose, to admit to the sacraments and to exclude from them, to declare the terms of communion and to enforce them, are not an encroachment on Christian liberty. They are the exercise of Christ's own lordship through the officers he has appointed. The believer who refuses to submit to the lawful censures of the church is not standing on his liberty; he is standing against Christ, who gave the keys to his church and who promised to ratify in heaven what his church, acting according to his Word, binds on earth. Calvin's insistence on the necessity of church government was so strong that the Scots Confession and the Belgic Confession would number the exercise of discipline, alongside the faithful preaching of the Word and the right administration of the sacraments, among the marks of the true church. You cannot have the gospel without the government of the gospel, because both are gifts of the ascended Christ to his people. Samuel Rutherford, the Scottish commissioner to the Assembly, provided the classic treatment of the limits and legitimacy of civil authority in his famous treatise Lex Rex. Though the book's immediate occasion was the conflict between king and covenant in Scotland, its principles apply directly to the questions Section 4 raises. Rutherford argued that all lawful authority is from God, that it is limited by God's law, and that resistance to tyranny is lawful only when the magistrate has become a tyrant — and even then, only through constitutional means and under the authority of lesser magistrates, never by private individuals acting on their own judgment. The private Christian who claims that the gospel frees him to resist the magistrate on his own authority has, Rutherford insists, misunderstood both the gospel and the magistrate. The gospel frees the conscience from human commandments in matters of faith; it does not free the body from the magistrate's sword in matters of civil order. The same apostle who wrote, "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free," also wrote, "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers." The two commands are not in contradiction, because the liberty of the one is spiritual and eternal, while the authority of the other is civil and temporal. The Christian who confuses the two liberties has confused the kingdoms. George Gillespie, the youngest of the Scottish commissioners, addressed the ecclesiastical side of the question with particular force. In his writings on church government, Gillespie argued that the church's power to censure error and to govern its own affairs is not derivative from the state, is not dependent on the magistrate's permission, and is not subject to the magistrate's review. It is a power given directly by Christ to his church, exercised by elders and presbyters who hold their commission from the King and Head of the church. But precisely because the church's authority is from Christ, it must be exercised according to Christ's Word and in Christ's manner, not with the sword, not with civil penalties, not with the coercion of the body, but with the Word, with admonition, with suspension from the sacraments, and finally with excommunication. The power of the keys is spiritual power, and spiritual power uses spiritual weapons. Gillespie would have been the first to condemn a church court that attempted to enforce its decrees by civil penalties, for such a court would have confused Christ's kingdom with the kingdoms of this world. But he would have been equally swift to condemn the believer who, claiming Christian liberty, refused to submit to the lawful censures of a church acting within its Christ-given authority. That believer, Gillespie would say, has not been liberated by the gospel; he has been inflated by pride, and his inflation, if not repented of, will end in destruction. A. A. Hodge, commenting on this section, observes that the whole argument rests on a principle the modern mind struggles to grasp: that liberty and authority are not opposites but complements. The modern instinct, shaped by the Enlightenment's revolt against tradition, sees every exercise of authority as an infringement of liberty. The biblical mind sees authority as the framework within which liberty flourishes. A fish is free in water, a train is free on the rails; remove the water or the rails and both perish. A child is free within the boundaries of a loving home; strip the boundaries and the child is not liberated but lost. The authority of magistrate and church are the rails, the water, the boundaries within which Christian liberty is meant to operate. To destroy them in the name of liberty is to destroy the conditions of liberty itself. Hodge notes that the Divines were neither authoritarians defending a crumbling establishment nor libertarians celebrating the dissolution of all order. They were pastors who understood that sheep need a fold, and that the fold, when the Shepherd has built it, is not a prison but a pasture.

Puritan Application

First, distinguish carefully between the liberty Christ purchased and the license the flesh craves, and make that distinction the test of every claim to freedom. The flesh is a tireless counterfeiter, and one of its most effective strategies is to dress rebellion in the language of liberty. "I am free in Christ, therefore I need not submit to the elders' admonition." "I answer to God alone, therefore no synod may call my teaching into question." "My conscience is captive to the Word, therefore I may ignore the lawful commands of the magistrate." In every case, the claim sounds pious, and in every case it is false, because it severs what God has joined. The same God who gave you liberty gave you the church's eldership and the civil magistrate. Are you wiser than God? Do you imagine that the liberty he purchased is threatened by the authorities he ordained? The test of every claim to Christian liberty is whether it produces the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance. A liberty that produces rebellion, strife, contempt for lawful authority, and the fracturing of Christ's body is not the liberty of the Spirit. It is the license of the flesh wearing a gospel mask, and it must be mortified before it destroys both the one who claims it and the church he wounds. Second, recover the biblical vision of lawful authority as a gift, not a threat. The modern Western mind has been trained, by centuries of political philosophy and cultural formation, to view all authority with suspicion, to see every exercise of power as potential oppression, to greet every command with the question, "By what right do you tell me what to do?" The biblical mind begins elsewhere. It begins with the recognition that God is the source of all authority, that the authorities that exist have been instituted by him, and that submission to lawful authority is not a compromise of liberty but an exercise of it. The father who rules his household with wisdom and love, the elder who watches for the souls of the flock, the magistrate who bears the sword for the punishment of evildoers: these are not threats to your freedom. They are shields for your freedom, and to despise them is to despise the God who gave them. Repent of the ingrained suspicion of authority that the world has taught you. Learn to see the policeman on the corner, the judge on the bench, the elders in the session meeting, not as enemies of your liberty but as servants of God for your good. And when those authorities must be resisted — as they must, when they command what God forbids — resist with the sorrow of sons, not the glee of rebels. Third, honor the church's discipline as a means of grace rather than an infringement of conscience. The discipline of the church is not popular in any age, but it is particularly unpopular in an age that has made authenticity the supreme virtue and judgment the supreme vice. To be told that one's doctrine is erroneous or one's practice is scandalous is, in our culture, the ultimate insult, and many churches have quietly abandoned discipline rather than risk the offense it inevitably causes. But the Scriptures present church discipline not as an optional extra that churches may adopt if they find it convenient, but as an essential mark of a true church, a gift of Christ for the preservation of his people's holiness and the recovery of those who stray. When a church court calls a member to account for publishing opinions contrary to the known principles of Christianity, it is not attacking his liberty; it is fulfilling its commission from the King of the church. When elders admonish a brother whose conduct is bringing reproach on the gospel, they are not binding his conscience where God has left it free; they are applying the Word of God to a specific case, which is precisely what elders are ordained to do. The believer who receives their admonition, examines himself in the light of Scripture, and, finding himself in error, repents, has not surrendered his liberty. He has exercised it, in the most profound sense, by bowing to the Lord who speaks through his church. Fourth, do not confuse the spiritual kingdom of Christ with the civil kingdoms of this world, but do not separate them entirely either. The Confession maintains a careful balance that is easy to lose. On one side, the church is not the state. The weapons of the church are spiritual: the Word, the sacraments, the keys of the kingdom. The church may not wield the sword, impose civil penalties, or coerce belief. The liberty of conscience that Christ purchased is a liberty from precisely that kind of coercion in matters of faith and worship. On the other side, the state is not the church. The magistrate is God's minister for civil order, not for the government of Christ's body. Yet the two kingdoms, distinct as they are, are not hermetically sealed from one another. The magistrate has a duty to protect true religion and to suppress public blasphemy and idolatry, not by binding the conscience, but by maintaining the external conditions in which the gospel may flourish. The church has a duty to pray for the magistrate, to teach the magistrate's subjects to obey him in all things lawful, and to remind the magistrate, when he oversteps his bounds, that there is a King higher than Caesar. The believer who has grasped this balance will neither divinize the state nor demonize it, neither flee from the political order nor place his ultimate hope in it. He will render to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's, knowing that both Caesar and Caesar's coin belong, in the end, to God. Fifth, pray and labor for the peace of the church as the arena in which the liberty Christ purchased is displayed to a watching world. The external peace and order of the church is not a matter of mere administration, a bureaucratic concern for committee work. It is the visible manifestation of Christ's rule over his body, the corporate testimony that the gospel creates not chaos but communion, not rebellion against every yoke but willing submission to the yoke of Christ. When believers contend with one another, when factions form around personalities, when the church's peace is shattered by the publication of opinions that tear the body apart, the world looks on and concludes, not unreasonably, that Christian liberty is a recipe for anarchy. The Confession reminds us that such conduct is not an expression of liberty but a violation of it, and that the church possesses authority from Christ to call such offenders to account. But the responsibility does not rest only with the courts of the church. It rests with every member. The peace of the church is your peace. The order of the church is your order. When you are tempted to publish an opinion or press a position in a manner that you know will fracture the body, ask yourself whether the cause you are serving is the cause of Christ or the cause of pride. Ask whether the liberty you are exercising is the liberty to build up or the liberty to tear down. And if you cannot answer with a clear conscience that you are promoting the peace and edification of Christ's flock, then refrain. The liberty that Christ purchased is a liberty for love, and love, as the apostle reminds us, does not insist on its own way.

Prayer

O Lord God, who hast ordained the powers that be and purchased for us a liberty that no earthly authority can give or take away, grant us wisdom to hold these gifts together. We confess that we have often severed what Thou hast joined. We have used the liberty of the gospel as a pretense for resisting the authorities Thou hast set over us. We have despised the discipline of Thy church and called our pride by holy names. We have confused Christ's kingdom with the kingdoms of this world, and in our confusion, dishonored both. Forgive us, we pray, and teach us the mind of Christ. Help us to submit to every ordinance of man for Thy sake, not with the resentful compliance of slaves but with the willing reverence of sons who know that the Father who gave them liberty also gave them the magistrate, and is wise enough to know what they need. When the civil power commands what Thou dost forbid, give us the courage to obey Thee rather than men, yet to do so with Daniel's quiet resolve and not with the spirit of rebellion that Thou dost hate. When the elders of Thy church admonish us for error, grant us humility to examine ourselves by Thy Word, and where we have erred, to repent without reserve. And when we find ourselves in the place of authority, whether in home or church or commonwealth, keep us from the tyranny that would bind consciences where Thou hast loosed them, and from the negligence that would loose what Thou hast bound. Grant peace to Thy church, we beseech Thee. Put to silence the voices that would tear the body of Christ apart in the name of liberty, and raise up shepherds who will guard the flock with wisdom and with love. Give us to see that the rails on which the train of our liberty runs were laid by Thy hand, and that to remove them is to court destruction. Let the liberty Thou hast purchased in Christ be ever exercised in love, and let that love be ever guided by the Word that is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path, until the day when all earthly authority shall yield to the authority of the Son, and every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who with Thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, world without end. Amen.