On Making the Sword Righteous

Show Outline with Links

In a Nutshell

It has to be affirmed at the outset that we cannot impose Christianity at the point of a sword. Our weapons are not carnal (2 Cor. 10:4-5). But our weapons are in fact mighty, and after they pull down strongholds, and a Christian consensus develops as a result of effective evangelism and church planting, we find that we still have these swords. What shall we do with them? So absolutely, swords do not create Christians. But can Christians create righteous swords? Can anything be done with these things?

The issue is not whether swords can make men Christian. They cannot. The issue is whether Christian men can make swords Christian.

Introduction

Stephen Wolfe recently circulated an image of a page from Carl Trueman’s foreword to James Bannerman’s classic work, The Church of Christ. As a highlighted paragraph from that image made clear to me, before we can get anywhere helpful in our discussions of Christian nationalism, we need to deal with a fundamental confusion first.

The paragraph is ironic, because it begins with a statement that offers to “clarify a lot of confusion.” As you may not have seen the offending paragraph I am talking about, I have reproduced it below for you.

The Real Confusion

A real confusion of categories can be seen throughout the entire paragraph, but it is nicely summed up with this sentence. “To put it bluntly, the sword cannot be used to impose Christianity.” Well, of course not, and I don’t remember any of us arguing that it could be used that way. But the obvious truth of this is being used to obscure another truth, every bit as self-evident, and one that lies right at the heart of this debate.

Let’s build up to it from the foundation. Can the sword be used to enforce any laws whatever? Can a particular standard of behavior be required of a population, and with civil penalties attached for disobedience? The answer to this is clearly yes. We do not require the laws to be enforced as a means of giving cops exercise.

So yes. Laws enforced by the sword can be used to impose something.

This leads to the second question. Can the sword be used to impose unrighteous standards? Did Pol Pot enforce unrighteous standards in Cambodia between 1976 and 1978? The answer there is yes. Can the sword be used to impose righteous standards? Did the British use their naval power between 1807 and 1860 to capture approximately 1600 vessels and set free around 150,000 slaves? And did they effectively suppress the international slave trade? Again yes. Did they do it with nerf bats? No to that question. They used military power.

Here are two passages from Scripture that say as much, that reinforce this truth.

So when the HMS Good Deeds pulled into Plymouth harbor, would Carl Trueman have been waiting there on the pier, wanting to say something like, “Hey, now. The sword cannot be used to impose Christianity.” And if he had, how would he have responded if the captain of the vessel had retorted something like, “No. But Christianity can be used to impose righteousness on the sword.”

When the sword is used to enforce a righteous standard, is this something that can be effective? Does its neglect affect anything? Of course, yes, again.

And so this brings us to the central thing. We do not want to make men righteous by means of the sword. We want to make the sword righteous. The sword cannot make men Christian. But men can in fact make the laws Christian. This has been done in the past, and certainly can be done again. Our stubborn refusal to attempt it has resulted in our current laws staggering around, drunk and disorderly, heading generally in the direction of the Abyss. Can the sword be used to arrest people for praying outside abortion clinics? To remove children from homes because the parents won’t use the preferred pronouns? Can swords do that? Shouldn’t we make them stop?

All laws enforce a standard, and some of those standards are really messed up. I put this forward tentatively—merely a suggestion—but we really ought not to enforce abominations with the sword. We should stop doing that.

A Test Case

So it is certainly true that the sword cannot change a sinner’s heart. But when Luther started preaching a message that could change a sinner’s heart, was it possible for Frederick the Wise to deploy some swords to guard that particular preacher, and prevent some bad guys from taking him out? How did we get from the truth that swords can’t do everything good to the idea that they can’t do anything good?

That protection was possible, was it not? And so here is the question. Was it a good thing that Frederick did that? Or would we chide him too? “Frederick, you have to realize that the sword cannot be used to impose Christianity.” And what would we say if he twirled the tips of his mustache and said, “True that. But the sword can keep something else from being imposed on good Martin here.”

And Another Thing . . .

I want to run at this confusion from every direction I can think of. Trueman says:

But I need to remind everyone that Trueman has just said the power of the church is spiritual. And by his logic, this means we should have no business trying to gear Christianity in such a way as to avoid bloodshed. We have just learned—have we not?—that it is not possible to “coerce belief.” There are people out there who are committed to bloodshed, and it is not for the church to instruct magistrates to resist such evil men with the sword. Did I get this right? So since we cannot coerce belief, and we cannot impose Christianity with the sword, then the only thing for it is to turn in our Reformed credentials before going to join up with the Hutterites.

Because societies are made up of people, and because people have mechanisms that enable them to make collective decisions, and those decisions can be moral or immoral, righteousness or unrighteous, just or unjust, it really is not possible to be Reformed and take the stand that Trueman is trying to take. The only consistent option for this kind of thinking is the anabaptist way.

That Adjective Christian

A human being is created in the image of God, and when God undertakes to recreate that image of God in him, it makes sense to call him a Christian. And when a number of these individuals gather together in order to worship God in accordance with His Word, it makes sense to call that a Christian church. So much we can gather from the Scriptures. Scripture speaks this way.

After that, we are on our own. Can the adjective Christian be applied to anything else? A bookstore does not have an immortal soul, and so can there be such a thing as a Christian bookstore? Colleges do not bear the image of God so is it possible to work at a Christian college? Small businesses do not go to Heaven when they die, and so is it possible to have a Christian business, with a little fish in the window and everything?

Now if all these forms of social organization can be configured in a way that is conducive with the Christianity of those doing the organizing, then why wouldn’t it be possible to do this with a nation?

By the same token, only a person can—strictly speaking—be righteous or unrighteous. He is a moral agent, and at the Last Day he will be treated as such. But nevertheless, we should all know what we mean when we use short hand to describe a law as being righteous. The law itself is not a moral agent, but what we mean by calling a law righteous is that the law was passed by legislators who were moral agents, seeking to have a law on the books which, if implemented, would be a blessing to those who were living under it, and all in accordance with the will of God.

Letters carved in stone are not moral agents, and ink on paper is not in that category either. Nevertheless, Scripture here does speak of righteous statutes and judgments, even though they are not going to Heaven when they die.

So this objection is just catching at words, and then playing around with them, the way a cat does with a ball of yarn. It is like complimenting your wife on her lasagna, saying that she is a marvelous cook—putting down your fork and saying, “You are so good”—only to have her reply that no one is good but God alone.

Return to the Top

So let us return to my basic reversal. Laws and swords cannot make men good. Amen. But there are two points to make here. While we can’t make men good, if we put the fear of strict justice in them, which is possible in a fallen world, we can get them to act as though they were good. Kinda. They may still want to kill babies, but they no longer get to kill babies. They may still want to diddle kids, but they need to act as though they didn’t want to. Such is merely an external conformity, true enough, but it is still a net blessing for all concerned—if we include the babies and kids.

The second thing is this. When men are made good by some other means—by straight gospel, let’s say—and then a Christian consensus develops over time, can such men, from the midst of such consensus, make good laws? As opposed to bad ones?

Here are three possibilities. One is that good laws are possible, hypothetically and on paper, but as a practical matter they are just impossible. Satan is the god of this world, so just deal with it. If that is your position, then the Amish await your arrival. The only consistent option is radical separation from the world.

Another is that there is no distinction whatever between a good law and a bad one. It is all the same. Heaven is indifferent in such matters. If that is the case, then what I propose is that we redouble our efforts to bring in Christian nationalism instanter. If it doesn’t matter, and we can just do what we want, then why not just do what we want? That would be Christian nationalism, at least as far as I am concerned. If Jesus doesn’t care one way or the other, then that means that we are allowed to care. So let’s try it. But this is ludicrous, because that would mean He also wouldn’t care if we did the whole Handmaid’s Tale thing, and that can’t be right.

A third option would be the historic Reformed view of the civil magistrate. Lawmakers should seek to conform our laws to the pattern or template established for us by Almighty God, set down for us in the natural law (pre-Grotius) and in divine Scripture. Let us call this option theonomy. All the Reformed johnnies shouldn’t have freaked out at Greg Bahnsen the way they did. But shoot, I would even take a Triple-A theonomic amalgam—Aquinas, Althusius, and Alfred. It would at least be way better than this nihilistic farrago we are living in now.

The one option that is not open to us is that of just quietly abdicating our responsibility to work through these issues in the light of our Reformed commitments, letting the secularists do whatever they want, and then trying to secure for ourselves a piece of that action. We then pretend that is somehow a principled Christian stand. This approach treats the secular state as a gigantic atheistic sow with multiple teats, and thinks that our role is to struggle with the other piglets for a spot. Er, a place at the table.

At least the anabaptists have the courage of their convictions.

The only reason that the opt-out Reformed Christians find their current position in the West acceptable to their consciences at all, and even halfway livable, is because previous generations of Christians acted in ways that flatly disregarded the admonition of Trueman’s paragraph above. Wilberforce fought long and hard to end British participation in the slave trade, doing so even though he should have known that the sword cannot make men Christians. What was he thinking?

Well, he was probably thinking that even though the sword cannot make men Christians, it is nevertheless possible for Christian men to make the sword cease from being an instrument of brutality and enslavement.

A Rag Bag of Miscellaneous Observations

In conversation with a friend last week, something was pointed out to me that I thought I needed to clarify. I am fond of saying that if there is no God above the state, then the state is god. My friend pointed out that this can be misunderstood because, like it or not, God is always above the state. Consequently, this is a hypothetical that can never come to pass and so what am I going on about? I take the point, and so let me expand that sentence in a way that shows what my shorthand is intended to mean. When I say, “If there is no God above the state, then the state is god,” what I mean is this: “If there is no God acknowledged by the statists, then this is tantamount to a claim by them that they are in fact god.” This claim of theirs is one I deny as not only false and impious, but also absurd. It is also a claim that explains a lot about what is going on around us.

A second thing. In this post, I am clearly challenging a set of assumptions being made by Carl Trueman because I believe they really do need to challenged. But in doing this, I want to engage with him in a way that would not preclude the two of us having a beer together, along with good fellowship. This period of turmoil that we are currently in is one that many are using to wreck any possibility of friendship with other brothers after the turmoil is over, which is not the way. In the providence of God, some men will have been revealed as having been fatally compromised in all this turmoil, but this is not automatically the case. Some out there in Online Land could be really upset with Trueman, and will therefore applaud what I wrote above, but they should remember that life is still messy and complicated. Some who think that Trueman is totally compromised have not themselves done a fraction of the good that he did with his Rise and Triumph book. I say this granting the inconsistencies between that book and the paragraph I am interacting with here.

And third, a quick note on the uses of political power. One of the things that distinguishes the dissident right from the old guard right is that the dissidents are quite prepared to use power as a means to their political ends, and the previous generation of conservatives was much more wary about doing anything like that. My note here is that they both have a point, and that there is a snare that endangers both approaches.

A righteous political ruler scatters the wicked, and it is good and right that he do so. “A wise king scattereth the wicked, and bringeth the wheel over them” (Proverbs 20:26). But if the wicked have been in ascendancy for a long time, as they have been, and they have built a gigantic and swollen apparatus of oppression for themselves, as they have, and then conservatives take over and then start using that ungodly apparatus on their political enemies, this is not scattering the wicked, but rather is joining them. But at the same time, it is good and right and just to utilize every lawful scriptural means to put down the wicked. “A wise king scattereth the wicked, and bringeth the wheel over them” (Proverbs 20:26). But not with their tools.

Some of the old guard will applaud what I just said, and I appreciate that. But there is a fatal error in their direction as well. Far too many old guard conservatives are actually liberals in their disposition. Robert Frost once defined a liberal this way. “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” How many conservative senators have voted to approve Godforsaken nominees for the Court in a misguided and gentlemanly attempt to persuade the progressives that their first priority was the decorum of the Senate—as opposed to the welfare of these United States? Such that they wind up maintaining neither? This happens, and happens a lot, because of a refusal on their part to use the lawful and legitimate power that they actually do have.

But people who are allergic to the use of political power . . . ought not be in power.