Abraham Kuyper on John Calvin on the United States Congress

Here is a money quote, passed on to me by my son-in-law Luke, who got it from his dad, who is working through Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism. Kuyper is quoting from Calvin’s commentary on Samuel.

“And ye, O peoples, to whom God gave the liberty to choose your own magistrates, see to it, that ye do not forfeit this favor, by electing to the positions of highest honor, rascals and enemies of God.”

One of the temptations to folly that falls out of the notion that American liberty is a unique thing in the world is the idea that the threats to that liberty that we are currently facing are also unique. Because of this, we don’t look to God’s Word for wisdom in how to deal with it. We think our temptation is a singularity. We don’t look to history to see how it has been dealt in the past — but it has been dealt with repeatedly in the past.

Blessings and curses are always binary. There is always a mountain of blessing to the right and a mount of curses to the left. There have always been scoundrels and fools ready to assemble in the king’s court, and there has always been God’s requirement for kings to look for good men who are ready to help banish greasy climbers. This was true prior to 1776, and it has been true ever since that time.

For century after century, many nations have experienced the heavy hand of tyranny and mismanagement. For century after century, many other nations have been responsibly governed, and have enjoyed the blessings of liberty for a time. This is the kind of general truth that can be described in a proverb. “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn” (Prov. 29:2). This is generally true — just look around. Read a book.

We are in a period of mourning right now, and this is so because the wicked are currently in control. Yeats nailed it — the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. But lest we blame the scoundrels inside the Beltway, as though that were where the problem arose, the wicked bear rule here in a nation that holds orderly elections every two years. We choose these people, which means that we are ignoring (to our peril) the pointed warning that Calvin gave. What happens to a people who use this favor from God — free and untrammeled elections — in order to bestow the highest honors on skunks, graspers, thieves, grifters, blackguards, miscreants, villains and stinkers? Such a people lose their liberty to choose their own leaders, and given how they were using it, that constitutes no great loss.

The United States is only a nation, and we are experiencing no temptations except those that are common to man. And there is a way of escape. Stop voting for mountebanks. There, I said it. I am clearly spinning out of control. Good thing regulations are headed toward the Internet to make sure that only flatterers have posting privileges.