Newsgroups: bit.listserv.christia
Date:         Thu, 3 Sep 1992 23:29:27 EDT
From:         MKLINE%VDH.BITNET@VTVM2.CC.VT.EDU
Subject:      Civil Disobedience

Subject: Civil Disobedience

    In this exciting issue: "... if the state commands that which is
contrary to the law of God, the Christian not only has the privilege, he
has the absolute duty to disobey the state. And if we do not face that
bottom line, we must recognize where we are. We have said, contrary to
what the early Christians said, we have said, that the state is God."

    "In other words, there's no middle ground on this one. None what so
ever. Either the state is going to be made God, and we're going to obey
it no matter what, or we must face the factor that there are certain
places we come to where the state must be disobeyed."

    I added this because some may be more interested in this one than
some of these others. This was a topic that was pretty hot some time
back.


    Dr. Francis Schaeffer, Part 5, Civil Disobedience.
                                                              (Feb 1982)
    Pat: What about resisting the government? We're told to obey the
civil authorities. The Christians were told by Paul to obey those in
authority, and yet they wouldn't obey that point which said you must
worship the Emperor as God. What about us today?

    FS: Well, we must realize that the humanist that we've been talking
about, the one holding the materialistic view of final reality. Those who
hold this view, and that most of they youngsters now, down into the
university. They have no reason for obeying the state except the state
has the guns, and they can give out things to the people. That's all.

    They have no reason, anymore more than they have for sexual values,
or any other values. The Christian, on the other hand, is told to obey
the state. So we have a reason to obey the state, and the state is one of
the offices given by God, to restrain this fallen abnormal world from
falling from going to chaos.

    BUT, and we come strongly to the "BUT". But that does not mean that
God has set up an autonomous authority, autonomous to Himself and His
commands. It is not as though the government is the one place where man
is meant to be the measure of all things.

    Now this meant in the early church, just what we just saw, that when
Caesar said he was to be worshiped. You must realize, from the Christian
viewpoint, it was religious. From the state's viewpoint, it had nothing
to do with religion at all. You could be an atheist. You could worship
ANYTHING, zoasterism, anything. They didn't care. It had nothing to do
with religion. It was purely civil. So when those Christians said, "We
refuse to worship Caesar." and they were thrown into the Roman arena,
they were in civil disobedience. They were the rebels. Now we have to get
that into our mind.

    The same thing is true when we come to the reformation. There was no
place that the reformation was successful without some form of civil
disobedience, and often something stronger. Consequently, we come now, we
must face the question, in the bottom line, what I believe the bottom
line is simply this, and that is that there comes a time where the state,
whether it's a communistic state, or our own state, no matter what it is,
if the state commands that which is contrary to the law of God, the
Christian not only has the privilege, he has the absolute duty to disobey
the state. And if we do not face that bottom line, we must recognize
where we are. We have said, contrary to what the early Christians said,
we have said, that the state is God.

    In other words, there's no middle ground on this one. None what so
ever. Either the state is going to be made God, a false God, a God, and
we're going to obey it no matter what, or we must face the factor that
there are certain places we come to where the state must be disobeyed.

    Pat: Back to the Revolution. Our Forefathers had a not too arbitrary
king. He was claimed to be a Mad man, but he was not as near as bad as
Communists are today, King George. And there was a Parliament, and
Parliament put some taxes on the people. They weren't terribly burdensome
taxes, they were stamp taxes on certain exports, and imports and so
forth. Nothing as we would consider in relation to our current Internal
Revenue taxes, it was a fraction of what we have to pay now. And yet they
decided that was cause enough to rebel, to have a revolution.  And of
course they quartered troops, they did other things that were obnoxious
to the people. What was the role of the Christian clergy, in that
Revolution?

    FS: Well, what we must realize is, just as the Wall Street Journal,
that I've quoted before, pointed out, that it was the Great Awakening,
that got people ready for this, and as I stressed, and document very
carefully, in the book, The Christian Manifesto. The Christian clergy had
a great deal to do with all this, and no greater name than Witherspoon.

    Witherspoon was a great hero of mine, and he's president of what is
now Princeton University, and he was the only signer of the Declaration
of Independence, and he followed directly after Samuel Rutherford and his
writing, Lex Rex. And whether you hold the view that Witherspoon did or
even those who weren't Christian individually, never the less they all
saw, they all had the view, that when you came to tyranny, that you had
to oppose it.

    And the Christians, the Christian clergy, really the real Bible
believing Christians, not the deists, no.  The real Bible believing
Christians were very much rooted back into that concept where the early
church stood. And that is that as Christians they had a responsibility to
stand against what they saw as tyranny. And it was back into Samuel
Rutherford again, and behind that into John Knox, and that is that all
tyranny comes from the devil, and not from God, because God wants people
to be free, and not to be held with any form of tyranny.

    Now you mentioned about our present laws, our present taxes, and so
forth. What we're facing in this country today is far beyond what they
were facing. And if they thought they had to stand against tyranny, we'd
better stand against tyranny. And we have tyranny. We have a hidden
censorship.

    Pat: Tell us about that. What is it?

    FS: Well, a good example. We showed this "What Ever Happened to the
Human Race?" It's technically a good film, everybody acknowledges this.
So we offered it to public television. The woman who saw it, the director
in Washington, as soon as she heard it was against abortion, she said,
"We can't show this because we can only show things that show both
sides." So she wouldn't even look at it.

    But, simultaneously they were showing this abominable Hard Choices,
which is sheer propaganda in favor of abortion. Public television, I
think is a clear viewpoint, a clear illustration of a hidden censorship.
You have Cosmos. You have Bernasky's The Ascent of Man. You have Claud's
Civilization. You have a new series coming on right now at the present
time on evolution.  All these things carried along with public tax money.
But we cannot get our things on. You have to pay for your things, (Pat:
Oh, absolutely.) and something like "What Ever Happened to the Human
Race?" absolutely has no place.

    Pat: What about Dr. Koop? You speak of censorship. He was one of your
dear friends. Tell us about him.

    FS: Clear illustration. The liberal newspapers dominated by this
humanist view they carried REAMS of material trying to get poor old Dr.
Koop, who's been my friend for 30 years, trying to get him not to be
accepted as the Surgeon General of the United States. When he was
accepted, the Washington Post ran, as I remember, 1 inch on the third
page.

    Pat: That's awful. Well now, his qualifications, he had been given an
award by the French Government for his work in pediatrics. He's one of
the most eminent pediatricians in the United States, in the world.

    FS: He has developed more operational procedures for small babies,
for preemies than any man in the world. And he also has had experience in
the direction of what would be the care of public health. And this was a
pure, just as we were shut off with "What Ever Happened to the Human
Race?", he was shut off, not because he didn't have the qualification,
but because he stood for human life, and the value of human life, and
behind it the Christian view instead of the humanist view.

    Pat: And so the secular media mobilized itself in this campaign to
destroy him, and did not allow his good points to be brought out.

    FS: You know, and we must say something, very carefully now, if we're
going to have any chance on this battle. It doesn't mean that 6 people
who meet together in a smoke filled room and have a plot. If you hold the
world view, of materialism, and you're in the media and not all the media
has this, but if you're in the media, or you're in government, or you're
in education, you don't have to get together and have a plot, because
your world view going to, with absolute inevitability, bring forth
simultaneous action together at the particular issue.

    Pat: Well, I'd be the same way. You'd got to be fair. I don't want to
give great amounts of air time to professed atheists and humanists who'd
want to destroy the Christian world view, and I'd guess they'd be the
same way in relation to us.

    FS: Yes, but you're a bit different. You pay for your time. The
newspapers are supposed to make a distinction between news and the
editorial page. If they want to be against us on the editorial page,
that's their privilege, and it's our privilege not to buy the newspaper.
But when they begin to get into this sort of thing and have a hidden
censorship on the newspages, that is tyranny.

    Pat: Well not only that of course, the government itself is paying
enormous amounts of money to organizations like Planned Parenthood who
give out pro-abortion literature and help foster abortions. Any number of
liberal organizations have been funded to several multi millions,
hundreds of millions of dollars out of taxpayers money.

    FS: That's right and Planned Parenthood's a perfect example. They've
got all kinds of money out of the government. And yet all you have to do
is pick up the newspaper ads that they're running now in favor of
abortion to understand that they are only a propaganda agency, and the
founder of it was ALWAYS opposed to abortion, and they've changed
completely over. And what you have is the realization that tax money goes
to these people that are propaganda agencies, and we're shut out.

    Pat: Well again, you can look at the Woman's Year situation, where
they had that woman's rally in Texas. Only those who were essentially
anti-Christian were invited to it and it was 5 million dollars of public
money, where as the Christians had a much larger rally, totally ignored.
And this kind of thing has been in our recent history time and time and
time again.

    FS: And this fixes another thought in our mind. Humanism, this
materialistic view, intrinsically is oppressive, and it's exclusive. The
proof of it is the public schools. They take over the public schools, and
they will not allow, Civil Liberty's Union lawyers, and other people will
not allow another voice. And they absolutely use a perverted view of the
first amendment in order... Now this one really should bring us up short.

    The schools in the United States today are secularized, they are
Marxist, but they are secularized as the schools in Russia. The schools
in Russia allow only the materialistic view to be taught. But in the
United States, the public schools today, paid for by parents' tax money,
are as exclusively teaching the materialistic view as our schools in
Russia.  And even if the parents as in Arkansas and Louisiana and these
other places, even if the parents don't want it taught, the courts are
the vehicle to say "Your children have to be taught exclusively the
materialistic view whether you like it or not."

MAKS> Ironically, today they are passing out Jesus tracts supplied by
      CBN and I beleive they reported some are showing tapes of the
      Flying House and Super Book. No, not here, in Russia. :-(

    Pat: Well that of course is oppressive, it's tyrannical, it's exactly
what Thomas Jefferson spoke against. Now what do we do? The window, in a
sense, may be open, but the tyranny is coming down. What should
Christians do as this is happening? How shall we get involved?

    FS: We should operate on what Samuel Rutherford would have called the
appropriate level. You don't start from the top, the biggest thing, you
start where you can. We are fortunate to be one of the very few countries
left in the 150 some countries of the world that have freedom. We should
use every political means. That means electing people who will carry out
these views and at least be for freedom, that's all we ask.

    We don't ask that our view would have preeminence. We're asking for
freedom, the very thing our Founding Fathers were willing to die for.
Then we ought to carry on. And in the courts we ought to have good
Christian lawyers like John Whitehead and so on, carry these things right
up into the Supreme Court, and challenge all these things because they
are quite opposed really, to the legal continuity out of the past.

    Then beyond that we must be willing to disobey, and it's up to the
individual Christian, no body else should tell another person, but there
would be a place to stop paying part of your taxes in these areas,
because of these areas. There would also be a place to picket. There is
a place to do all these things. There's a place perhaps to have a sit-in
in the Supreme Court.

    In other words we should work on the appropriate level, but using the
freedoms we have, we're not carrying out, either out God given command
nor even what our Founding Fathers would have considered the proper
attitude toward tyranny. We're not carrying out either one unless we use
the appropriate means at the present time to reverse the direction we're
going in.

                                    Francis Schaeffer 1912-1984

Maks
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