Devotional 124: The Authority of the Magistrate: To Protect the Good and Punish Evil

The Confession Read

It is lawful for Christians to accept and execute the office of a magistrate, when called thereunto: in the managing whereof, as they ought especially to maintain piety, justice, and peace, according to the wholesome laws of each commonwealth; so, for that end, they may lawfully, now under the new testament, wage war, upon just and necessary occasion.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 23, Section 2

Introduction

Among the soldiers of the Roman garrison stationed at Capernaum there was an officer who had watched the carpenter of Nazareth at his work and had formed his own judgment of him. The Gospels preserve no name for this man, but they preserve his words, and they are among the most striking words that any Gentile addresses to Christ in the whole New Testament. When his servant lay at home paralysed and tormented, the centurion sent word to Jesus and then, as the Lord drew near his house, sent friends to speak on his behalf: "Lord, trouble not thyself: for I am not worthy that thou shouldest enter under my roof. Wherefore neither thought I myself worthy to come unto thee: but say in a word, and my servant shall be healed. For I also am a man set under authority, having under me soldiers" (Luke 7:6–8). The man who spoke these words held a sword. He was a Roman officer, a servant of an occupying empire, a man whose place in the chain of command ran all the way up to the throne of the Caesar who would one day nail his Master to a cross. And Christ's answer to him was not a correction, not a summons to resign his commission and seek some purer trade. It was wonder. "I have not found so great faith," he said, "no, not in Israel" (Luke 7:9). The scene matters more than its surface suggests. In our last study we saw the Confession declare that the civil magistrate is an ordinance of God, armed with the sword for the defence of the good and the punishment of evildoers. But that teaching, once granted, raises a second and more pointed question. It is one thing to say that God ordains rulers; it is quite another to ask whether a believer may actually be one. May a Christian accept and execute the office of a magistrate? May he sit in the seat of judgment, hold the sword, command soldiers, and, if necessity should require it, lead those soldiers into war? There were many in the age of the Reformation who answered with an emphatic no. The Anabaptists, and later the Quakers, taught that the magistrate's office is defiled by blood, that the sword and the gospel cannot share a single conscience, and that the Sermon on the Mount forbids any follower of Christ from punishing, judging, or making war. The Confession answers such teaching with a careful, deliberate yes — a yes framed and guarded and explained in a single sentence that has shaped the church's thinking about public life for nearly four centuries. This is not a remote question of political theory. It touches every Christian who has ever been summoned to serve on a jury, to stand for public office, to wear a uniform, or to vote for those who will. It asks whether the duties of the magistrate are a second-class citizenship into which a believer may reluctantly descend, or a holy calling into which he may joyfully enter. And it asks, at the deepest level, whether the love that Christ commands can ever take the form of a sword. The Confession's answer will require us to think carefully about the difference between a private person and a public office, between revenge and justice, and between the two kingdoms that God has established in this present age.

Scripture Foundation

The clearest warrant for the Christian's participation in the office of authority comes not from the Old Testament, where magistrates and judges and kings fill the pages, but from the New, and from the ministry of John the Baptist, who stood at the hinge between the two covenants. When the crowds came to John at the Jordan asking what repentance looked like in daily life, three groups approached him in turn: the people, the publicans, and the soldiers. To the publicans he said, "Exact no more than that which is appointed you" (Luke 3:13). And to the soldiers, the men who bore arms for the Roman state, he said this: "Do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely; and be content with your wages" (Luke 3:14). Notice what John did not say. He did not tell the soldiers to lay down their arms. He did not tell them to desert, to resign, or to abandon the army as a trade unfit for the kingdom. He told them instead how to be soldiers well — soldiers who do not abuse their power, who do not extort, who are content with their pay. The Greek word for "soldiers" is strateuomenoi, "those who serve in the ranks," and the command "do violence to no man" renders diaseisēte, literally "shake no one down" — the language of extortion, of using military authority to terrorise the helpless into parting with their goods. John's charge assumes that a man can be a soldier and a servant of God at the same time, and that the duties of the one do not cancel the duties of the other. The soldier's repentance is not to abandon his calling but to purify it. The Gospels confirm this with their own portrait of soldiers. The centurion of Capernaum, whom we met a moment ago, stands as the first and clearest example. When he declared, "I also am a man set under authority," he did more than confess Christ's power over sickness; he was describing the shape of his own life. Authority, in his world, was a chain: he was under a commander, and soldiers were under him, and the word that he spoke moved that chain. Christ, who might have told him that the whole chain was corrupt and must be broken, instead marvelled at the faith that had grown within it. "I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel." The man who said "I am under authority" understood, better than most of Israel's teachers, what it meant for the Son of God to speak with authority. And he understood it because he was a soldier, not in spite of it. His profession had taught him the very truth about authority and obedience that his faith now laid hold of. The sword at his side did not disqualify him from faith; it became, in the ordering of God, the school in which his faith was learned. The book of Acts carries the argument further still, for the first Gentile convert to Christianity was a soldier. "There was a certain man in Caesarea called Cornelius, a centurion of the band called the Italian band, a devout man, and one that feared God with all his house, which gave much alms to the people, and prayed to God alway" (Acts 10:1–2). Here is a man who commanded a hundred Roman soldiers, a career officer of the occupying power, and Scripture describes him in the very language of devotion: devout, God-fearing, generous, prayerful. And when the door of the gospel was thrown open to the Gentiles, it was to this soldier that Peter was sent, and over this soldier and his household that the Holy Ghost fell. The apostle drew the lesson in words that echo down the centuries: "Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him" (Acts 10:34–35). God did not require Cornelius to resign his commission before the Spirit would descend. The firstfruits of the Gentile church was a man who had spent his life bearing the sword, and the Spirit found no contradiction between the two. But if the New Testament shows that a Christian may hold the office of authority, the Old Testament shows how he is to hold it, and this is where the Confession's second clause finds its ground. The magistrate, the Confession says, is "especially to maintain piety, justice, and peace." The word "piety" renders the Greek eusebeia, godliness — the reverence that orders a man's whole life toward God. "Justice" renders dikaiosynē, righteousness — the even-handed rendering to every man of his due. "Peace" renders eirēnē — not the mere absence of conflict but the ordered tranquility of a community at rest under good government. These three duties are not inventions of the seventeenth century; they are the burden of the Old Testament's instruction to rulers. When Jehoshaphat set judges in the land, he charged them: "Take heed what ye do: for ye judge not for man, but for the LORD, who is with you in the judgment. Wherefore now let the fear of the LORD be upon you; take heed and do it: for there is no iniquity with the LORD our God, nor respect of persons, nor taking of gifts" (2 Chronicles 19:6–7). And when Moses prepared Israel for the day when a king would sit upon the throne, he commanded that the king should write out a copy of the law and "read therein all the days of his life: that he may learn to fear the LORD his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do them: that his heart be not lifted up above his brethren" (Deuteronomy 17:19–20). Piety — the fear of the Lord and the study of his law. Justice — no respect of persons, no taking of gifts. Peace — the fruit of a throne upheld by "mercy and truth" (Proverbs 20:28). This is the threefold cord by which the Confession binds the magistrate's office, and every strand of it comes straight from the Scripture that the Divines knew by heart.

What the Divines Meant

The first clause of the section is a declaration of lawfulness: "It is lawful for Christians to accept and execute the office of a magistrate, when called thereunto." The word "lawful" is doing heavy and deliberate work. The Divines were not saying that the magistrate's office is a regrettable concession, a compromise that a Christian may tolerate when he can avoid nothing better. They were saying that it is lawful, legitimate, and honourable for a believer to hold it. This was aimed directly at the Anabaptists, who had concluded that the office of the sword is so entangled with the shedding of blood that no disciple of Christ may touch it. Their argument had a superficial plausibility. Did not Christ say, "Resist not evil," and "Love your enemies"? Did he not bid Peter sheathe his sword in the garden? The Anabaptists reasoned from such texts to a wholesale withdrawal from political life: no Christian may be a magistrate, no Christian may be a soldier, no Christian may swear an oath or serve on a jury, for all these involve the coercion and the bloodshed that the gospel forbids. The catastrophe of Münster, where armed Anabaptists seized a city and set up a reign of terror in the name of the kingdom, only confirmed to the Reformers how unstable this doctrine was in practice — for the very movement that denied the Christian the lawful sword proved capable of taking up an unlawful one. Against this, the Divines declared that the office is lawful, and they added a crucial qualification: "when called thereunto." The magistrate does not seize his office; he is called to it. The Greek word behind the idea is klesis, calling or vocation, and it carries the same weight that it bears in Paul's instruction that every man "abide in the same calling wherein he was called" (1 Corinthians 7:20). The office of the magistrate, like the office of the minister, is entered by a lawful call — by the election, the appointment, or the lawful succession that the constitution of the commonwealth provides. Ambition that thrusts itself into power, intrigue that purchases it, and violence that seizes it all fall short of the calling that the Confession describes. A man may lawfully accept the office, and having accepted it, may lawfully execute it — the one word speaking of the call, the other of the faithful discharge of the duties that follow. The second clause describes how the office is to be discharged: the magistrate is "especially to maintain piety, justice, and peace, according to the wholesome laws of each commonwealth." The word "especially" is significant. The magistrate has many duties — roads to build, revenues to collect, treaties to negotiate — but these three stand above the rest, and the first of them is piety. This was the most contested claim of the whole section, and it sets the Reformed teaching apart from every secular theory of the state. The magistrate is not merely to keep the peace and let men worship as they will; he is, in his public capacity, to foster piety, to acknowledge the God by whom kings reign, and to govern under his law and before his face. The phrase "according to the wholesome laws of each commonwealth" is the counterweight that keeps this claim from tyranny. The magistrate governs by the wholesome — that is, the sound and salutary — laws of his own nation. He is not bound to a single prescribed constitution, whether monarchy or republic, for the Confession wisely leaves the form of government to the prudence of each people. But neither is he a law unto himself. The laws he administers must themselves be wholesome — consistent with the moral law of God and directed to the good of the people — and it is by those laws, not by arbitrary will, that piety, justice, and peace are to be maintained. The third clause is the most difficult, and the Divines did not flinch from it. The magistrate, "for that end," may "lawfully, now under the new testament, wage war, upon just and necessary occasion." Every word here is measured. The phrase "now under the new testament" is aimed squarely at the perfectionist reading of the Sermon on the Mount. There were many who conceded that war was permitted to Israel under the old covenant but insisted that the coming of Christ had abolished it — that the law of love, once proclaimed from the mount, had made it impossible for a believer ever again to take up arms. The Confession denies this. War remains lawful now, under the gospel, as much as it ever was. But notice the boundary that the Divines draw around it. War may be waged only "for that end" — for the end already stated, the maintenance of piety, justice, and peace — and only "upon just and necessary occasion." Not every war is lawful. Not every cause, not every occasion, not every motive justifies the shedding of blood. The occasion must be just — a true and grievous wrong to be righted, an aggression to be repelled, an innocent people to be defended — and it must be necessary — the last resort, after every peaceful remedy has failed, when no lesser means remains to secure the end. Robert Shaw, in his Exposition of the Confession of Faith, summarises the conditions that the church has always attached to a just war: it must be waged by lawful authority, for a just cause, with a right intention, and with the aim of securing peace. To glorify war, to delight in it, to wage it from ambition or revenge or the lust of conquest — this the Confession condemns with the same breath in which it permits the just and necessary defence of the innocent.

Theological Depth

The deepest question that this section raises is not whether the state may wage war, but how the love that Christ commands can ever be reconciled with the sword that the magistrate bears. It is a question that has troubled tender consciences from the time of the early church to the present, and the Reformed tradition has answered it with a distinction that runs back to Augustine and was sharpened to its keenest edge by Calvin. There are, Calvin argues in the fourth book of his Institutes, two kingdoms and two forms of government in the present age: a spiritual kingdom, by which the conscience is trained in piety and the worship of God, and a civil kingdom, by which the outward conduct of men is ordered and the public peace preserved. The one is the kingdom of Christ ruling by his Word and Spirit; the other is the kingdom of the magistrate ruling by law and sword. They are not enemies, for both are ordained by the same God and both serve the same end — the good of man in this present world and the next. But they are not identical, and to confuse them is to ruin both. The man who reads the commands of the Sermon on the Mount as rules for the civil magistrate will either strip the magistrate of the sword he is commanded to bear, or burden the private Christian with a duty of revenge that Christ forbids him. The man who reads the duties of the magistrate as the duties of every private believer will make every Christian a punisher and every neighbour a judge. Out of this distinction flows Calvin's treatment of war itself. The magistrate who wages a just war, Calvin insists, is not violating the law of love but fulfilling it. For the magistrate is a public person, the minister of God for the good of his people, and the love that he owes his people binds him to protect them — by the sword if necessary. A magistrate who refused to draw the sword for the defence of the innocent would be no friend of peace; he would be, in Calvin's stark phrase, an accessory to the violence that he declined to resist. The same charity that feeds the hungry and clothes the naked, when it is seated upon the judgment seat and invested with public power, arrests the murderer, restrains the violent, and, when no lesser means will serve, leads armies into the field against a tyrant who would devour the weak. The private man forgives his enemy and turns the other cheek; the magistrate, acting for the whole community, punishes the evildoer and defends the innocent. Both are acts of love. Both are Christian. They differ not because one is virtuous and the other sinful, but because the one is the love of a private person and the other is the love of a public office. Watson, in his Body of Divinity, presses the same truth into the sphere of the sixth commandment. The commandment "Thou shalt not kill," Watson observes, forbids the unlawful taking of life, but it does not forbid, and indeed it requires, the lawful protection of life. The magistrate who bears the sword bears it because God has placed life under his guardianship, and the sixth commandment, rightly understood, is a commandment to preserve life as much as a prohibition of destroying it. Watson does not hesitate to apply this to war: when a magistrate wages war for the defence of his people against unjust aggression, he is not committing murder but preventing it, and the soldier who fights under him is not a violator of the sixth commandment but its servant. The distinction, once again, is between the private man, who must love his enemy and leave vengeance to God, and the public person, who is the minister of God's own avenging justice. Watson's conclusion is that the office of the magistrate, far from being closed to the Christian, is one of the highest callings a believer can pursue, for it is the calling by which God preserves the innocent from the wicked and gives the church a quiet and peaceable life in which to preach the gospel. A. A. Hodge, in his commentary on the Confession, answers the objection from the Sermon on the Mount more directly than any of his predecessors. The commands to resist not evil, to turn the other cheek, to give the cloak also, Hodge argues, are addressed to the believer as a private person, and they forbid precisely what the magistrate is called to do — namely, the vindication of one's own rights and the retaliation against one's own injuries. But the magistrate, when he punishes the criminal or wages war, is not vindicating himself. He is vindicating the law of God and the good of the community. The love that forbids me to avenge myself does not forbid the magistrate to avenge the widow, the orphan, and the oppressed, for the magistrate does not act on his own behalf. Christ's own conduct makes the point. When he stood before Pilate, he did not resist; he turned the other cheek, and he forbade Peter's sword. But he also said to Pilate, "Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above" (John 19:11), acknowledging that Pilate's authority, even as it was about to be abused against the innocent, was a real authority from God. The same Lord who refused to take up the sword in his own defence declared that the sword in Pilate's hand was divinely appointed. The two truths stand side by side because the one Lord speaks as a private sufferer and the other as the sovereign over every throne. Warfield, in his essays on the Christian's relation to the state and on Augustine's teaching, supplies the historical depth. The church, Warfield reminds us, has never been uniformly pacifist. The early Christians who refused to serve in the Roman army did so not because they thought all war sinful but because the Roman army required them to burn incense to the emperor and to participate in idolatry; where military service could be rendered without apostasy, Christians served, and by the time of Augustine the just-war tradition had taken its classical form. Warfield's point is that the just-war doctrine is not a late corruption of a primitive pacifism but the careful, scriptural working-out of the conviction that the magistrate is God's minister and that the preservation of the innocent is a positive good. The question was never whether Christians might take life in war, but under what conditions, by what authority, and to what end they might do so — and it is exactly those conditions that the Confession's phrase "just and necessary occasion" compresses into a single breath. Turretin, in his Institutes of Elenctic Theology, rounds out the argument with the precision that earned him his place in the schools. Against those who taught that war is absolutely unlawful, Turretin lays out the conditions under which war may be waged: it must be declared by lawful authority, for a just cause, with a right intention, and conducted with due moderation. The authority must be the magistrate's, for private persons have no right of the sword. The cause must be just — the defence of one's own people, the recovery of what has been unjustly taken, the punishment of a nation that has committed grave wrong and refused reparation. The intention must be right — the securing of peace, not the gratification of cruelty or the pursuit of glory. And the conduct must be moderate — sparing the non-combatant, restraining cruelty, and pressing the war no further than justice requires. When these conditions are met, Turretin concludes, war is not merely lawful but is an act of obedience to God, who has committed the sword to the magistrate precisely so that justice may be done and the innocent may be sheltered from the violent. The Confession's "just and necessary occasion" is the whole of this tradition compressed into five words.

Puritan Application

First, recover the dignity of the public calling. There lingers in some corners of the church the half-conscious assumption that the truly spiritual callings are the ministry and missions, and that law, government, and military service are at best a necessary concession to the world and at worst a compromise of the faith. The Confession will not allow it. The office of the magistrate is a holy calling, one of the means by which God preserves the innocent and restrains the wicked, and the man or woman who enters it lawfully and discharges it faithfully is serving God no less truly than the pastor in his pulpit. The centurion whom Christ praised, the Cornelius upon whom the Spirit fell, the Erastus whom Paul calls "the chamberlain of the city" (Romans 16:23) — these are not spiritual also-rans but men whose public offices were the sphere of their discipleship. If God has called you to public life, whether to the bar or the bench, to elected office or to the uniform, receive that calling as from his hand, and labour in it as unto the Lord. Do not despise the calling that the King of kings has dignified by appointing it. Second, distinguish the private person from the public office. This is the hinge on which the whole section turns, and the failure to grasp it produces two opposite errors. The man who reads "resist not evil" as a rule for the state will drift into an unbiblical pacifism that would leave the innocent defenceless and the tyrant unopposed. The man who reads the magistrate's duty to punish as a licence for his own resentments will drift into an unbiblical vindictiveness, avenging his private injuries in the name of righteousness. Both errors are avoided by the one distinction that the Reformers laboured to teach. As a private person, you are to love your enemies, forgive those who wrong you, and leave vengeance to God. But the magistrate is not a private person, and when he punishes the criminal or restrains the violent, he is not avenging himself but serving the public good as the minister of God. Keep these two persons distinct, and you will be neither a pacifist nor a vigilante, but a Christian who honours the sword in the magistrate's hand while refusing to take it into his own. Third, honour and pray for the magistrates and soldiers among you. The same apostle who commands us to honour the king commands us to make "supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks... for all that are in authority" (1 Timothy 2:1–2), and that duty bears with particular weight upon those who serve alongside us in the congregation. The magistrate who judges rightly, the officer who restrains the violent, the soldier who stands between the innocent and the aggressor — these bear burdens that most of us will never know, and they bear them as ministers of God. Honour their office, support them with your prayers, and thank God for the protection that their service affords the church and the commonwealth alike. When a believer sits in the judgment seat or wears the uniform, he is not a second-class Christian but a first-line servant of the God who is not mocked, and he is worthy of the honour due to those whose safety he secures. Fourth, if you hold office, govern by piety, justice, and peace. These three duties are not optional ornaments of the magistrate's work; they are its substance. Let piety be first: acknowledge in your public conduct the God by whom you reign, and govern in the fear of the Lord, as one who must give account to a Judge who is no respecter of persons. Let justice be unwavering: no taking of gifts, no partiality to the rich or to the poor, no respect of persons, but an even hand that renders to every man his due. And let peace be the end of all your labour: not the peace of oppression, which silences the weak by force, but the ordered tranquility of a community that is safe because the evildoer is restrained and the righteous are protected. "Mercy and truth preserve the king: and his throne is upholden by mercy" (Proverbs 20:28). The magistrate who governs by these three will find that the public good and the glory of God, which the first section joined together, are the two faces of a single duty. Fifth, hold the doctrine of just war with the gravity it deserves. The Confession permits war, but only "upon just and necessary occasion," and those five words are a bridle as much as a permission. Let them teach you to hate the cheap glorification of war that treats the shedding of blood as a sport, and to distrust the bellicose spirit that hastens to the sword when patience and diplomacy have not yet been tried. Let them also teach you to reject the false peace that would leave the oppressed to perish rather than lift a hand to help them. The just-war doctrine is a discipline of conscience: it forbids us to make war lightly, and it forbids us to make peace shamefully. It compels us, before the first shot is fired, to ask whether the cause is just, whether the authority is lawful, whether the intention is upright, and whether every lesser remedy has failed. And it compels us, when the war is done, to pursue the peace for which alone the war was ever lawful. The magistrate who wages a just and necessary war is doing the work of God; the magistrate who wages any other kind sheds blood that the earth will cry out against. The difference between the two is exactly the difference that "just and necessary occasion" was written to mark.

Prayer

O Lord God, supreme Lord and King of all the world, who hast ordained civil government for the good of men and hast made it lawful for Thy people to serve Thee in the office of the magistrate, we bow before Thee with thanksgiving for this calling, and with fear lest we despise it or corrupt it. We thank Thee for every ruler whom Thou hast raised up to be a terror to evildoers and a praise to them that do well, and for every magistrate and soldier among Thy people who bears the burden of the sword for the safety of the innocent. Grant them, we beseech Thee, the grace to govern by piety, justice, and peace, to fear Thee more than they fear man, and to wield their authority as those who must give account to the Judge of all the earth. Teach us to honour the office of the magistrate even when we cannot honour the man who holds it, to submit to lawful authority for Thy sake, and to distinguish aright between the duties of the private person and the duties of the public office, that we may neither take vengeance into our own hands nor grow cold toward the defence of the oppressed. And when the nations of the earth are drawn into war, we pray that Thou wouldst restrain the proud, frustrate the wicked, and grant wisdom to those in authority, that no blood may be shed but upon a just and necessary occasion, and that the sword, once drawn, may be laid down again in a peace that glorifies Thy name. Hast Thou not shewed us, O man, what is good? And what doth the Lord require of us, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God? O Lord, write this law upon our hearts, and upon the hearts of all who rule, until the day when the Prince of Peace shall reign and nations shall learn war no more; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.