What conclusion does the old testament draw whenever an establishment fails?
Thinking about Cromwell
- Thread starter TryingToLearn
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RamistThomist
Puritanboard Clerk
Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah
Northern Crofter
Puritan Board Junior
I don't believe I used the word "pure" anywhere. The establishment ideal fail when the Church fails in its duty. The State cannot be expected to then do anything else other than descend into sin - as the WLC (see Q/A 191) acknowledges, we pray the God's kingdom would come because "all mankind [is] by nature under the dominion of sin and Satan." None of this means there is not a moral obligation upon the State to help maintain the Church, its officers, and its ordinances, and to favor it in order to promote its purity, the spread of the Gospel, and the comfort of its people.
Just a small one?!
RamistThomist
Puritanboard Clerk
That's true, but I think the reality on the ground isn't as neat. Assuming that Cromwell was a bad ruler (leaving aside regicide for the moment), then he must be seen as a judgment on the church. And I don't want to say that the same church that gave the Westminster Assembly also failed in its duty.
Ploutos
Puritan Board Sophomore
Must he be seen as actively a judgment on the church? There are people that fall into the grey area between blessing and curse... to draw from the OT, kings like Asa or Uzziah. I think Trump is a more likely candidate for someone being used of God from within to judge the church in a particular country.
As for the Westminster Assembly, there is precedent for great developments in doctrine being made in messy circumstances. Cyril doesn't seem like he was a particularly nice guy and a lot of the machinations around Chalcedon may be suspect. It hasn't caused me yet to question the formulation that resulted.
RamistThomist
Puritanboard Clerk
Maybe. That isn't my particular argument. I'm just doing a hypothetical based on Northern Crofter's claim.
Phil D.
ὁ βαπτιστὴς
The joint religio-politico arrangement of OT Israel is abolished. General equity in various particulars may or may not apply now. A key point in sorting this out is that fact that OT Israel was the church, not the church + the pagans or other nations around it. Jesus and pre-Constantinian Christians treated the two in terms of separation. History cannot definitively prove the rightness or wrongness of establishmentarianism, but it does demonstrate the folly or gain of the idea.
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TryingToLearn
Puritan Board Freshman
If I remember correctly, it was pretty common for the Reformed to list “high treason” as capital, as I think Piscator and Cotton argued for. The basis of resistance theory is that the king is not acting as king but as an outside attacker in such a case since he is making war on the people, which is really where “treason” is to be found. Of course, what exactly qualifies as “high treason” would need to be defined, but I do think the general principles are there to justify Charles I’s execution.
That said, I am interested to know more about who supported it and who opposed it.
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Northern Crofter
Puritan Board Junior
I agree - it's never neat and it's never pure because it involves fallen people, even the redeemed ones.
It was more than one Church. They admitted from the start one was more and the other less reformed (and another that was deplorable). The Churches that gave us the Westminster Assembly did not equally perform their duty. Perhaps the issue was combining a political league with a religious covenant.
RamistThomist
Puritanboard Clerk
That was the problem.
Phil D.
ὁ βαπτιστὴς
Sounds like a practical manifestation of establishmentarianism...
TryingToLearn
Puritan Board Freshman
Just found this https://www.jstor.org/stable/1920971
TylerRay
Puritan Board Graduate
As did the Confederates. https://confederatereprint.com/slave_trade.php
I frankly would have thought you would have known better.
Btw, I'm not a modern-day covenanter, but I think Richard Cameron was on the right side of the issues.
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Northern Crofter
Puritan Board Junior
I'm afraid I don't see how the failure of the league part of the SL&C has any bearing on the establishment principle. The covenant was for the nations involved to establish a Reformed Church in their respective lands.
I'm not sure what to think of the concept of joint or multi-national establishmentarianism. My understanding is that God deals with peoples and nations, not leagues and alliances.
Northern Crofter
Puritan Board Junior
I don't think Dabney proved what you think he proved - he simply proved that both North and South were involved in the national sin of man-stealing, the South primarily in the demand side, and the North primarily in the supply side. I think it is hard to mollify either side considering the fact that slave ownership split several P&R denominations. But it's never a simple argument when you bring to bear the fact that there were "slave states" on both sides of the American Civil War, and the fact that the North continued to profit from slave labour while at the same time they (at least some of them) decried it.
Phil D.
ὁ βαπτιστὴς
This is an interesting and complicating facet of the whole historical situation. Three "kingdoms" (with one participating quite unwillingly) under one shared monarch, requiring a single religious standard to be observed in three establishment state-churches...
Maybe a harbinger of what establishmentarianism would be dealing with on steroids in a 50 state republic situation...
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Northern Crofter
Puritan Board Junior
Agreed. To try that it would take a 50 state republic with a very overreaching federal government that has largely quashed those states' rights and implemented a loose interpretation of its Constitution in order to further increase its centralization of power. Oh, wait...
Ploutos
Puritan Board Sophomore
I'm in agreement. This is my problem with Dabney - so insightful on many topics and so utterly short-sighted on this one. I get the sense that he is not reproaching slavery solely on its wrongness, but only as a way of reproaching everyone who engaged in the practice except for the South, on whose behalf he contrives victim-complex arguments built on the most distorted logic. Say what he might, the south bears its share of blame, both at the individual and state level, for at various times defending and actively seeking to propagate the practice of man-stealing. One doesn't have to absolve the north of any amount of blame to lay at the feet of southerners their fair share of guilt.
To take my own OT diversion and swing back to the main topic of this thread... one thing that has always bothered me about the resistance principal is that it must posit a temporal authority above the king to make such determinations, without giving a framework for determining precisely who that authority is. Sure, we all know that God is over all, including the king. But what God-ordained temporal authority is invoked to determine when a king is guilty of treason? At the back of all arguments about common law and natural lights must lie some temporal interpreter of those arguments, and short of that framework, I fear that the resistance principal potentially undermines a biblical concept of authority (besides providing at least a potentially problematic view of how Christians are supposed to handle suffering and persecution).
alexandermsmith
Puritan Board Junior
The King is not the head of the church and the church has the right to call assemblies for the discussion and elucidation of doctrine. The Westminster Assembly did not take to do with matters political (so far as I know), but spiritual, which are reserved to the office-bearers of the church. The Assembly also had disagreements with Parliament, which held to an Erastian rather than Presbyterian (Scriptural) view of the church. So it was quote appropriate for the Assembly to conduct its business even if the King and/or Parliament opposed some of its actions.
The most egregious sin of the Roundheads was the regicide, for which there is no legal nor Biblical support (which they themselves tacitly acknowledged). If Charles had been killed on the battlefield that would have been one thing. But he was captured and then put to death: quite another. David had opportunity to kill Saul but refrained from doing so, and put to death the man who claimed to have killed Saul: "How wast thou not afraid to stretch forth thine hand to destroy the LORD's anointed?". Despite knowing that he was the rightful King of Israel, having God's seal upon him, he still refused to lay his hand upon one who had been anointed King. I think there's a lesson there for us.
This is not to say that resistance against a tyrranical king can never be justified; nor that there weren't legitimate grievances against Charles I that maybe justified war. But Charles was defeated. The Roundheads didn't just want to preserve the liberties of the people but effect a full-scale revolution. When Charles, at his trial, suggested there was an irony in the Roundheads claiming to be upholding the "ancient" rights of the people, and yet pursuing their current course of action, he was not wrong. And they knew it too, which is why they kept silencing him.
Northern Crofter
Puritan Board Junior
Are you arguing that a monarch can never be executed by their own people? It would seem that both Saul and Charles were guilty of the unjust deaths of others, a capital offense.
Would you support a monarch being lawfully and orderly deposed, and then put on trial for the crimes committed that led to their being deposed? I do see both Saul (see Deuteronomy 17.14-20) and Charles as constitutional, not absolutist, monarchs (i.e. both bound by the rule of law).
Can you really call it regicide if the person is no longer the rightful/lawful monarch? (I do see a difference here between Saul and Charles - Saul was Divinely replaced by David as king whereas Charles was replaced along with the idea of monarchy itself)
RamistThomist
Puritanboard Clerk
True, but David specifically rejected the idea of killing Saul. One might make an argument for regicide, but it breaks down if one uses Saul as an example, since David killed those who claimed they killed Saul.
TylerRay
Puritan Board Graduate
The problem is that Charles wasn't the Lord's Anointed. Saul was the Lord's Anointed (Jehovah's Christ) because of his typical Messianic office. No man takes Christ's life from him; he lays it down of himself.
The Archbishop of Canterbury can pour as much oil on as he wants; it still doesn't make the British Monarch Jehovah's Christ. He's just a man, and he's subject to the law, with all its penalties, as much as anyone else.
alexandermsmith
Puritan Board Junior
Prosecutions in the United Kingdom are done in the name of the King. How can the King prosecute himself? And he certainly didn't in the case of Charles' assassination. There was no legal basis for it, which the rebels knew themselves.
TylerRay
Puritan Board Graduate
Tyranny being enshrined in the law of the land doesn't justify it. I'd like to see you prove such a notion from Scripture or nature.
Rather than limiting the inquiry to the OT typological messianic monarchy, why not consider other kings mentioned in the Bible. Take Agag, for example. Charles was as much a natural (i.e., non-messianic) king as Agag was. Was he the Lord's Anointed king? Is Samuel to be esteemed a regicide for executing him?
Northern Crofter
Puritan Board Junior
But this is the question that remains: Where did David get this from?
Saul was no longer the anointed king. He was rejected by God. David was divinely appointed, anointed, and empowered to replace him. Saul was no longer in office (rather he continued to usurp it). These points are all clear in Scripture (in I Samuel 16 alone). What is not clear is what made David think it was wrong to kill an un-anointed king.
Doesn't the end of Deuteronomy 17 imply that a monarch can lose their kingdom and life if they reject - and are then rejected by - God? "And it shall be with him, and he shall read therein all days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, to keep all the words of this Law, and these ordinances to do them: That his heart be not lifted up above his brethren, and that he turn not from the commandment, to the right hand or to the left, that he may prolong his days in his kingdom, he and his sons in the midst of Israel." These words seem to convey that violating the first table of the Law (turning from the commandment) and/or the second (lifting his heart above his brethren) will shorten a monarch's reign. And if God raises up a new king, as he did with David, isn't it that king's duty to prosecute the deposed monarch for the crime(-s) they were deposed for?
I believe David's anointing answers these questions to a large degree:
I also believe Calvin's teaching to close his Institutes (Book 4, Chapter 20.24-32) regarding the role of lesser magistrate is correct. Just a few pertinent quotes:
- "the natural feeling of the human mind has always been not less to assail tyrants with hatred and execration, than to look up to just kings with love and veneration" (20.24)
- I obviously question in 20.28 Calvin's repeating David's self-prohibition regarding Saul and concluding that a deposed monarch remains untouchable because "the Lord had invested him with royal honour" - I'm not sure how this is not contradicted by his later reasoning:
- "he raises up manifest avengers from among his own servants, and gives them his command to punish accursed tyranny, and deliver his people from calamity when they are unjustly oppressed...Israel from the tyranny of Pharaoh by Moses; from the violence of Chusa, king of Syria, by Othniel; and from other bondage by other kings or judges. Thus he tamed the pride of Tyre by the Egyptians; the insolence of the Egyptians by the Assyrians; the ferocity of the Assyrians by the Chaldeans; the confidence of Babylon by the Medes and Persians...deliverers being brought forward by the lawful call of God to perform such deeds, when they took up arms against kings, did not at all violate that majesty with which kings are invested by divine appointment, but armed from heaven, they, by a greater power, curbed a less, just as kings may lawfully punish their own satraps." (20.30)
- "deliverers being brought forward by the lawful call of God to perform such deeds, when they took up arms against kings, did not at all violate that majesty with which kings are invested by divine appointment, but armed from heaven, they, by a greater power, curbed a less, just as kings may lawfully punish their own satraps." (20.30)
- "Although the Lord takes vengeance on unbridled domination, let us not therefore suppose that that vengeance is committed to us, to whom no command has been given but to obey and suffer. I speak only of private men. For when popular magistrates have been appointed to curb the tyranny of kings (as the Ephori, who were opposed to kings among the Spartans, or Tribunes of the people to consuls among the Romans, or Demarchs to the senate among the Athenians; and perhaps there is something similar to this in the power exercised in each kingdom by the three orders, when they hold their primary diets)." (20.31)
Bringing it back to the OP, I'm not fully convinced Cromwell was the proper person to fulfill the role of the lesser magistrate in his day - his overthrow was of not just a monarch but the monarchy in favor of what was for all intents and purposes a military dictatorship and that is problematic. Had he removed the king to allow someone else to ascend to the throne, that would have seemed more in keeping with the role of the lesser magistrate.
alexandermsmith
Puritan Board Junior
Can you give me an example from Scripture of the King being put on trial?
RamistThomist
Puritanboard Clerk
And to take it a step further: there were numerous lesser magistrates in ancient Rome who would depose (or kill) emperors. Such was probably happening with Nero--yet Paul never makes that argument. Granted, it's an argument from silence, but still...
TylerRay
Puritan Board Graduate
Sure, Agag in I Samuel 15.
“And Samuel said, As thy sword hath made women childless, so shall thy mother be childless among women. And Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal.” (1 Sa 15:33).
He was condemned and executed by a civil magistrate.
I struggle to follow this argument. Is a judge executing a pagan leader after a just war, acting on direct command of God, comparable to a king's own subjects executing their'e king?
If he can't be put on trial, dosen't that practically put him above the law, and render justice impossible?
TylerRay
Puritan Board Graduate
Our brother is arguing that kings cannot be tried and executed, full stop. Agag's case disproves his argument.
I agree that it doesn't in itself prove that subjects may try and execute their king, but that's not the use I'm making of it.