Glenn Sunshine and Pastor Joel dissect civil tyranny, defining it as state usurpation of God's authority over conscience and liberty. They contrast pre-political natural rights with modern secular license, critiquing welfare policies and the Equality Act for encroaching on church sovereignty. The dialogue highlights the conditional nature of Romans 13 submission and warns against privatizing Christ's lordship. Ultimately, they argue that societal moral erosion drives reliance on inefficient government aid over finite church resources, urging eternal vigilance to maintain distinct spheres of authority rooted in biblical law. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Freedom Within Boundaries00:14:24
Applying God's Word to every aspect of life.
This is Theology Applied.
Hi, this is Pastor Joel with Right Response Ministries.
This is our show slash podcast called Theology Applied.
And today, with this particular episode, I am honored to have as a special guest Glenn Sunshine.
He's the author of a book called Slaying Leviathan.
And we're going to be talking about the topic, the subject matter that his book addresses at great length.
The idea of civil tyranny, the idea of big government, of government overreach throughout human history in different nations and cultures, and the tradition of Christian resistance in the midst of civil tyranny.
And so I'm pleased and honored to have you, Glenn Sunshine.
Would you take a moment and just introduce yourself to our guest?
Tell us a little bit about yourself, your ministry, and particularly your book, Slaying Leviathan.
Well, thank you for having me.
I am a College professor.
I'm a professor of early modern European history, specialist in the Reformation.
And along with that, I am involved in a podcast called the Theology Pubcast, which we do weekly.
And I also have a ministry called Every Square Inch Ministries.
And anyone who is familiar with Kuiper will know the quote There's not a single square inch in the whole domain of human experience over which Christ, who is Lord of all, does not cry, Mine.
And that is the origin of the name for the ministry.
The book Slaying Leviathan came out of a combination of things.
Some of it was my studies in grad school, but a lot of it really was a response to trends that I saw going on a few administrations ago.
I started really working on this issue of Christian ideas of liberty, tyranny, and resistance, well, like I said, a few administrations ago, and it seemed time to pull it together into a book, and that's what Slaying Leviathan is about.
The book traces a couple of different kinds of ideas.
One of them is where Christian ideas of liberty came from, where the ideas of unalienable rights came from.
The answer, by the way, is medieval theologians, medieval Catholic theologians, interestingly enough.
And then from there, we move into the Reformation era with resistance theory, Luther's idea of two kingdoms, Calvin's idea of covenantal basis of government.
And then along with that, The fundamental question of when is it legitimate for Christians to resist properly constituted government?
When does a legitimate king turn into an illegitimate tyrant?
And that thought begins with Luther, it passes through the Huguenots to the Puritans, and ultimately reaches its probably best expression with John Locke.
And then from there, it shapes the founding of the United States.
Great.
Well, I think we're in for a treat.
So let me just go ahead and hop in with some questions and.
And I really think for the benefit of our listeners, it's important that we understand the history.
And I know for you and your context of being a professor, you're probably like, hey, we can't just talk about the present because we'll continue to make mistakes in the present if we don't know our history.
So I definitely want to give you an opportunity to talk about the history that you go into great length in your book addressing.
That said, could you, just in simple terms, could you give us a brief definition of what is civil tyranny and maybe some of the, you know, You know, kind of, I think it like, you know, you're a redneck if, you know, like, you know, you're, you know, you're tyrannical if blank.
What constitutes, where's the line and what is breaching that line?
So, what constitutes civil tyranny?
And then, maybe speaking to some present moments, is there anything that you see in our current political climate that would be an example of that civil tyranny?
Okay, yeah, there are a couple of different ways we can get to this.
The first of them is going back to Jesus' words, always a good idea.
He says, in answer to the question about paying taxes to Caesar, he says, render to Caesar the Things that are Caesar's and render to God the things that are God's.
Okay, so that was in the context of paying taxes, but I think it's a much broader principle than that.
What it says is that the government has legitimate authority, but that legitimate authority is limited.
There are things that properly do belong to Caesar and there are things that properly belong to God.
On a theological level, oh, and by the way, God is the one who determines what belongs to Caesar.
Let's add that one in as well.
So, on a theological level, civil tyranny occurs when Caesar begins usurping authority that he doesn't legitimately have, when Caesar starts extending his power into areas that are not properly his.
In the early church, this really, the first place where you see this argued has to do with freedom of religion, interestingly enough.
Religious liberty was something that early Christians argued strenuously for, typically on the grounds that.
Worship that is compelled is not pleasing to God.
So you have to allow people religious liberty, otherwise, you're compelling worship and that won't please God at all.
So basically, where that leads is freedom of conscience.
The only one who has authority over our consciences is God.
When the government claims authority over your conscience, that is a clear breach of.
Government's authority and it's usurping something that properly only belongs to God.
Then through the Middle Ages, oh, excuse me, go on.
No, I was just going to say, what would be a practical example of the government attempting to lay claim on the consciences of men?
Could you think of something like a tangible example?
When the government tells you what you must believe about anything, that would be an example of it.
In the modern context.
Now, what's interesting here, what's important to note is that even if the government is telling you you must believe something that we as Christians know is true, that is still a usurpation of its authority.
So, if the government mandates certain kinds of language, which is really fundamentally about thought control, and the government mandates you must, there are certain things that you can and cannot say.
That is a usurpation of authority that belongs to God because what it is doing is it's saying that you aren't allowed to think these things.
Yep.
Yep.
We see some of that going on.
Oh, absolutely.
Then from there, when you move to the Middle Ages, this isn't exactly the argumentation that they use, but the best way to understand it, so this is a later formulation, but the best way to understand it is to ask what rights, what liberties did people have?
Prior to the development of human government.
Because if you have institutions or rights that predate government, government cannot claim authority over those things because they pre exist government.
Yeah.
So, the institution of the family was established by God in the Garden of Eden.
Government has no authority to define what a family is, what marriage is, any of those kinds of things.
It can introduce certain regulations, but it cannot change the basic structure of marriage established in Genesis.
We have liberty itself as an example.
Now, liberty needs to be defined here.
When I was in school, they told me that liberty was just an old fashioned word for freedom.
That's actually not true.
The concept of liberty in the 18th century was really tied into ideas of virtue, ideas of purpose, ideas of living the best, the fullest life possible now, which was always a life that was aimed toward, well, virtue.
It is freedom that exists within boundaries.
So in the Garden of Eden, you see liberty in the sense that.
Adam and Eve are told you can eat whatever tree you want to, except that one.
There was a boundary that they weren't supposed to cross.
The alternative to liberty is what's known as license in the 18th century.
It's the root of our word licentious.
And license means freedom from restraint.
We are not going to accept any boundaries.
You can't tell me what to do.
In the modern world, we have completely lost the concept of liberty because we've lost the concept of virtue.
And without virtue, you can't have liberty.
So, all that's left for freedom is license.
It's freedom from authority.
I can do whatever I want to.
You can't stop me.
You have no right to do that.
Rather than living within the boundaries set by divine and natural law, which is what liberty would point to.
But that goes back to that.
That's super helpful.
Yeah.
Isn't that what Chesterton said?
Didn't he say, like, true freedom is found within the bounds or true liberty is found within the bounds?
I think it sounds like a Chestertonian kind of thing.
It sounds like a Chestertonian quote.
I don't know that one, but it's quite possible.
So, we can look at liberty as being something that is pre political.
The government cannot take that away from us.
It cannot take away from us our right to pursue a good life, good in the fullest and richest meaning of the word.
We see the right to property in the garden.
Where?
Well, first of all, there is the command to tend the garden and eat the fruit.
Yeah, you know, tend to keep the garden, protect the garden, whatever word there, but also you have the right to eat the fruit.
So Adam and Eve were literally entitled to the fruit of their labor.
This is known as the labor theory of property.
If you work for something, you have a right to it.
So property rights are actually predate government.
Okay.
So there are a number of things of this sort that we can point to life.
God gave Adam and Eve life in the garden.
Now, if you've been paying attention, you will have heard life, liberty, and property here, which are the three unalienable rights that John Locke mentioned.
All of them are pre political, all of them precede human government in the garden, and therefore government cannot arbitrarily deprive us of any of them.
Is it true, just for a moment to interrupt, is it true that we actually had that language of life, liberty, and property, and then it was changed later on to the pursuit of happiness?
I've heard that somewhere.
Yes.
Locke said that our unalienable rights are life, liberty, and property.
Jefferson changed property to pursuit of happiness, but we have to know what happiness means.
Happiness to Jefferson is, it goes back to a Greek word, eudaimonia.
He knows his Aristotle.
And eudaimonia in Greek philosophy is the highest purpose of life.
We have the right to pursue our highest ends.
That's really what the pursuit of happiness means.
And that involves virtue.
Again, in Aristotle, very clear it's Arataean Greek, the um, virtus in Latin.
Uh, the word points to excellence, pursuit of excellence in every area of life again, as a necessary element of fulfilling your highest purposes.
So, the pursuit of happiness really refers to the pursuit of your highest good, it's very closely tied to the concept of virtue, and with that, we should add.
That Jefferson firmly believed that property rights were included in there because you could not do this without property rights.
But he jumped over the walk and went back to Aristotle for that one.
Gotcha.
I appreciate what you were saying in terms of property rights, the way you were broadening it and your definition, because I think typically we just think of property rights as the right to own physical land.
But you were saying it's the right to the fruit of our labor.
And correct me if I'm wrong here, but there's an important distinction between passive and active rights.
There's a lot of things that people have begun.
Well, it's like the age of entitlement.
There's a lot of things that people feel entitled to.
They think they have rights to, that biblically speaking and just logically speaking, they don't.
And so, if there's a right to free health care, then wouldn't that infringe on what would technically be described as property rights?
That if property rights is I have the right to my own labor, then a doctor who worked hard to gain those skills and knowledge and all that, and he's a human being, he only has 24 hours in the day like the rest of us, it's his time, it's his work, his knowledge, and expertise.
We're saying, His property rights over his labor supersedes any pseudo right to health care.
And that would be a passive right.
Correct me if I'm wrong, I might be getting them backwards, but a passive right on the part of the doctor, that right to the fruit of his labor versus an active right.
Doctor as Slave Labor00:04:01
Could you explain that?
Am I on to something there?
Yeah, I think you are.
I don't typically use the language of passive versus active rights myself, but I know that that's out there.
But the key thing here is that.
If we believe in liberty, number one, and property rights defined as the labor theory of property, then what's happening with the doctor in that case violates both of them because functionally it ends up being slave labor.
The doctor, if I have an unalienable right to health care, then a doctor who refuses to treat me because I won't or can't pay him is violating my rights.
That's where this goes.
And while no one will say that, no one who advocates for the idea of healthcare as a right will say that, that's fundamentally where the use of the language in that way leads you automatically to that.
You're violating my rights.
You don't treat me.
You're right.
You're right.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, yeah, that's a logical conclusion.
It's a train that we don't want to be on because the end is dire.
Well, you've already kind of been.
Dancing around it a little bit and addressing it at some length, but can we go just a little bit deeper into John Locke?
Who's John Locke and what's so significant about his contributions?
And what do you wish Christians knew about John Locke and would fight for with his contributions?
Okay, before we get to Locke, I want to give you one more definition of civil tyranny.
Because, like I said, there are several different ways you can get here.
The other one, I'm going to go with a Kuiperian definition.
Kuiper believed.
That there were a number of spheres of life that were, well, autonomous.
They were established by God and intended to have autonomy.
Once again, you can trace a lot of these right back to the garden family, labor, and business, things like that.
There are, well, religion, worship.
There are a variety of these things that predate government that are therefore autonomous from government, largely independent of it.
Government has its legitimate sphere.
But so does the church, so does the family, so does education, so does business and labor, and so on.
He called this sphere sovereignty.
The idea is that each sphere has its own area in which it can govern itself.
The problem comes up when one sphere, and it is almost inevitably the government, begins to take on roles that properly belong to another sphere.
And when that happens, we are moving towards civil tyranny.
The government is once again expanding out of its legitimate zone, which is a fundamental definition of tyranny.
Now, this most often happens when one of the spheres stops functioning properly, when Wall Street is corrupt and you get derivatives trading and things like that, and bubbles like we saw happen a few years ago with the housing crisis.
That sphere, we describe that as the sphere collapsing, it ceases to function the way it's supposed to.
And then, when that happens, another sphere has to step in to try to pick up the slack or try to get it working again.
That will most often be the government.
But the problem is the government is incompetent outside of its areas of authority.
And therefore, when it's.
And sometimes within its area of authority.
Well, yeah.
I mean, yeah, even within its area of authority, it can be.
But when it steps out of that zone of authority, it is really ill equipped to do that kind of work and frequently makes the problem worse.
Family Sphere Collapse00:03:33
And it turns into, well, Leviathan.
It turns into this monster that engulfs everything.
And would you agree that even the welfare state would be a breach of government stepping into the sphere of the family?
That if indeed it's true that certain fathers, you know, or even at an epidemic proportion that fathers have failed in their responsibility of protection and provision, it still belongs to fathers, it belongs to this autonomous sphere, and the government steps in.
And ends up often doing more harm than good?
Would that be another example?
Well, let's take a look at this in terms of chickens and eggs.
Where did the problem start?
When I was growing up, my mother taught in inner city Newark, in New Jersey.
When the riots occurred in 68, my mom and dad put my brothers who were still at home and me in a car and drove us through the area during the day where the riots were taking place to explain to us why those riots were happening.
So I had sort of a front, well, backseat view of this, literally in this case.
But she would occasionally, she taught special ed, and she would occasionally go to visit her students at their homes and, you know, to talk to the parents and so on.
And she came home one day and mentioned that the student that she had gone to visit lived with his mother, but not his father.
And, you know, I was 10 years old, something like that.
I said, well, why doesn't his dad live with him?
And she said, well, it's because of welfare.
And I said, well, what's that?
It's, well, the government gives people who are poor money so that they can live.
But she said, the way the welfare program is set up, they get less money if the father is at home with them.
Right.
Because it incentivizes women not to marry the fathers of their children.
Well, because you see, now they're trying to do it right.
Because they assume that if the father's there, the father has a job.
But the problem was there were no jobs.
And so, in order to get enough money to keep the family going, the fathers had to leave the house.
Even when they were married and didn't want it, they had to leave the house.
And so, what this ended up doing is destroying the African American family in the inner cities, so that now we have this massive epidemic of unwed mothers, single parent households, and things like that.
The family collapsed, but the family collapsed because the government stepped into a sphere.
That isn't its responsibility.
The government is not responsible for welfare, especially not at a federal level.
That's the responsibility of the church.
It's the responsibility of local charitable organizations, those kinds of things, because they understand the issues on the ground better and can do a better job than the one size fits all policies of the federal government.
So they created the crisis in family by that policy, which I said.
Like I said, it was well intentioned and they were trying to do the right thing and they were trying to be responsible and all that sort of thing.
But the law of unintended consequences, which is the only universal law of history, kicked in, destroyed the family, and now the government is even more in loco parentis than they were before.
Christian Political Theology00:10:20
Yep.
I get it.
All right.
So now, with that final definition of civil tyranny, do you feel like we're ready to discuss John Locke?
Yeah.
Let's go to Locke.
Locke.
Locke is an interesting guy.
He is really important in terms of political thought.
He was a Puritan.
Due to a debate over the authorship of the Pentateuch that occurred in the key intellectual journal of the day, he moved into a more liberal version of Christianity.
But he never really lost his Christian roots.
And he might have been more liberal than we would be comfortable with, leaning deist and things like that.
But I think he's still within the broad Christian tradition.
What he did is he took a lot of elements of Christian thought that were already in place in terms of political theology.
So he took the idea of unalienable rights, which was developed, like I said, by medieval Catholic theologians.
He took resistance theory with its roots in Luther, but going through the Huguenots and the Puritans.
He took Calvin's idea of covenantal government.
The idea here is that when God established a government with Israel on Mount Sinai in Exodus, he did it in the form of a covenant.
And further, he asked them three separate times, Do you agree to abide by the terms of this covenant?
And they didn't ratify the covenant until you got the consent of the governed three separate times.
So Calvin then argued that government must be based on consent of the governed.
This was not a new idea.
But he adds to it that the covenantal nature of government.
And then this idea is going to pass very strongly into the Puritans.
They'll develop it further.
But all of these different things the idea of unalienable rights, the idea of resistance theory, the idea of covenantal government all of these different things operated sort of in their own lanes.
What Locke did is he synthesized them, he brought them together into a coherent system.
Really unified all of these different branches of Christian political theology for the first time.
And so you get Locke's idea that government exists.
Now he secularizes it a bit.
He is not as theologically oriented as I would like.
He changes the language of covenant to the language of contract.
Contract is a secularization of covenant here.
But he argues that government consists of a proper government, it is established as a contract between the government and the people.
That contract is based on the idea that it is going to be protecting the people's unalienable rights, life, liberty, and property, coming out of medieval theologians.
And that if the government violates that contract, violates the rights of the people, the people have a right to resist.
They have a right to stand up, overthrow the government, and replace it with one more to their liking.
Now, they do need to replace it with another government.
We're not talking about anarchy.
And that other government then is subject to the same contractual obligations to the people to protect their unalienable rights as the previous government had been.
Now, it said this is a brilliant synthesis of a lot of elements that already existed within Christian political theology.
It then crosses the Atlantic and becomes the foundation for Jefferson's thinking with the modification of pursuit of happiness that we talked about before.
And then this becomes a critical element in the establishment.
Of government of the United States government.
Now, there's another element that runs through this that doesn't go through Locke that's worth noting.
That comes from St. Augustine.
Augustine is the guy, he's probably best remembered today for predestination, but he's also the guy who really codified in a lot of ways the doctrine of original sin.
And original sin is an important, again, critically important concept for Western political thought because what it means is that there is no one.
That can be trusted with absolute power because everyone is corrupt and corruptible.
Therefore, government must be limited and must have systems of checks and balances in place.
This, again, is some part and parcel of the medieval political tradition coming out of Augustine.
We think of checks and balances as being American, but it really dates all the way back into the Middle Ages and with roots in Augustine's thought.
That became really strong with Calvin, who's heavily influenced by Augustine.
It goes to the Puritans, the Puritans to New England, and thus this fundamental mistrust of government is worked directly into the US Constitution through its system of checks and balances, as well, by the way, as its utter fear of political parties.
One of the things most people don't realize is that in the original Constitution, the president was the one who got the most electoral votes, the vice president was the guy who got the second highest amount of electoral college votes.
And the reason they did that is they knew from the experience of republics in Italy during the Middle Ages and Renaissance that if you get factions in the government and a faction manages to take control, it's the death of the republic.
And so they absolutely feared factions and parties.
Now they discovered pretty quickly How are we doing on that, Glenn?
Well, where does this lead?
The idea of the check, think about the checks and balance system.
The idea is that you've got three major branches of government.
I'm going to use that word, even though it's probably not exactly correct.
You have the executive, the presidency, you have the Senate, and you have the House.
The judiciary is non political in principle.
Basically, its job is to play referee.
But between those three branches, each of them represents one of Aristotle's ideal forms of government.
You've got the monarchical principle in the president, you have the aristocratic principle in the Senate, and you have the Republican principle in the House.
The idea, so it's technically what's referred to as a mixed state, okay, an Aristotelian mixed state.
The idea is that if any branch of government oversteps its legitimate bounds, the other two will rein it in, okay, because they were trying to use actually original sin.
To their advantage.
The idea is that each institution will be so interested in guarding its prerogatives that it won't let any other institution overstep its bounds and it'll team up with the other side, with one of the other institutions to stop.
Presidency gets too big for its britches, the House and the Senate will work against it.
The Senate and the President will work against the House and so on.
That only works if you don't have political parties.
Because once you have a political party, Loyalties are no longer to the institution, they're to the party.
And that crosses institutional lines, and therefore the system of checks and balances can't work correctly.
So instead of three united branches of government institutions, you have three different ones, but all three of them are fractured with different.
It makes me think kind of a silly example, but it makes me think of what fantasy football has done to watching football.
No longer do you have an actual team that you're rooting for because you're rooting for all these individual players who are spread out on all these different teams.
In some way, it kind of ruins the traditional way of watching football.
I don't know.
Just throwing it out there.
Well, again, the idea is that the different branches of government should be in competition with each other.
And instead, what happens is that that's how the system of checks and balances works.
It's the only way it works.
But when you get parties and you get the president and the Senate and the House or one faction versus another faction, the system of checks and balances breaks down.
Wow.
And that's really interesting.
Did not know even what you said about the guy who got the most electoral votes being the president and then the guy who got the second most.
It's not that just he and his administration lose, but he's actually the vice president.
I was not aware of that.
Yeah, it's a great idea in theory, in practice.
Could you imagine President Biden and Vice President Trump?
I am imagining that.
Right, yeah.
But even that, man, I'd rather that than Biden and Kamala.
But yeah, I get it.
Yeah.
So anyway, what you're seeing here in America is a combination of things.
Locke synthesizes, like I said, brilliantly a lot of elements of Christian political theology.
And then that gets transported over here with Jefferson.
When you add the Puritan component heading into the Constitution, you get a lot of the ideas from Locke coming in, but you're also getting this emphasis on original sin, which Locke didn't have.
And as a result, I would argue that the American, the founding documents of America, the Declaration and the Constitution, are probably the ultimate culmination of a long tradition of Christian political theology.
Romans 13 and Government00:06:37
And it's really, in a lot of ways, its last expression.
Because shortly after the Constitution is established, you get the French Revolution, which is a purely secular revolution.
With that, it changes the rules completely.
Political theory, political thought from that point on is dominated by the secular French Revolution and the ideas that come out of that, much more than from Christian political theology, which is really at the root of America.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, so with all that, well, one of the things I just got to play the devil's advocate for a moment, and I think it'll be helpful for our listeners, but.
I think one of the things that I just constantly hear Christians use to push back on some of the things you're saying is just, well, what about Romans 13?
What about different verses in the Bible that talk about it?
It seems as though the New Testament would say that there's just this blind submission from citizens.
Christians should submit to civil governments even when they are tyrannical.
How would you respond to that?
Well, what they're doing is they're appealing to Romans 13.
What they're ignoring is what Romans 13 says about the purpose of government.
Romans 13 says that the magistrate exists to punish evil and reward good.
Are we obligated to obey when the government punishes good and rewards evil?
When the government is not doing what God has ordained the government to do, are we still obligated to obey that?
Because in the context of Romans 13, it tells you what the government is to be doing.
Right.
It assumes.
Yeah, that's the argument that I've always used is saying that, you know, all the submission language from citizens to civil government in Romans 13, but, you know, it's all on the backdrop.
It's all on the assumption that the government is functioning in the way that God ordained it to function, that they're rewarding good, that they're punishing evil, they're bearing the sword for just reasons.
And so there's just, there's a lot of, There's a lot of things that I think Paul is assuming in Romans 13.
Submit to civil governments, and the implicit kind of word is when they look like this.
This is civil government.
This is God's design for civil government, and you should submit to that.
And I mean, he even says, Would you have no fear of the government?
Then do what is good.
So even that shows, Paul, I think, is showing his hand.
He's showing the assumptions that are baked into the text.
Because if he was just talking about governments, period, whether they were good, bad, or in between, Then I think he would offer some clarification when he says, you know, would you have no fear of the one who rules over you?
Like, then do instead of saying do what is good, he would have to say do what they want, whether that actually aligns with God's moral law or not.
And so I'm with you.
I agree.
I think I just, you know, we just often hear Romans 13, Romans 13, you know.
Yeah.
And that comes really from sort of a minimalist understanding of going right back to Jesus' words render to Caesar things that are Caesar and to God's the things that are God's.
That's going to sort of a minimalist view that says that only the things that are explicitly related to worship of God are gods.
The government has everything else.
It's not a Kyperian view.
Yeah.
I mean, so if they tell you you've got to worship a statue of the emperor, you've got to burn incense to the statue of the emperor, yeah, we got to draw the line there.
But pretty much anything else the government tells you to do, if it doesn't impinge on that, you need to do.
No.
Because there are things.
That are not the governments.
And they're a lot more than just the things that are explicitly God's, the things that God expressly commands.
And God owns a lot more than just the church.
I mean, if I had a dollar for every time, so, you know, Christ is the head of the church.
You know, Christ is the head of the church, not Caesar.
And it's like, I always want to point them to Ephesians or Colossians.
Amen.
Christ is the head of the church.
But did you know he's also the head of all things?
Right.
Christ is not merely the head of the church, you know.
Yeah, when I'm talking about the kingdom, I will usually say, you know, a kingdom.
The Greek word vasileia, translated kingdom, really doesn't necessarily refer to a geographic territory.
What it refers to is the exercise of royal authority.
Thus, even if a Roman soldier on an errand for Caesar is not in Roman territory, it doesn't matter.
He is still the kingdom, is there with him, in him.
Okay.
So, if you You then take the next step and say, okay, the most basic Christian confession is Jesus is Lord.
Now, that was itself an inescapably political statement because the de facto confession of the Roman Empire is Caesar is Lord.
But let's move it to a current context.
What is Jesus Lord of?
And I'll give you a hint it's a three letter word that rhymes with call.
Okay.
Now, we say this in our hymns.
We sing this in our hymns all the time.
You know, crown him Lord of all.
What is not included in all?
Right.
Well, I think you're absolutely right.
And I think the problem is that the American evangelical modern church has pushed Jesus' lordship all the way back to exclusively the realm of the heart.
Jesus is Lord of all.
We've replaced all, I think.
You're right.
We still do have some of those hymns and some of that language.
He's Lord of all.
But But you see it quickly eroding away that Jesus is Lord of all language and being replaced with Jesus is the Lord of my heart.
And so Jesus is like his lordship, you know, it's very, very limited.
And it's a private, right?
Lord of my heart.
It's internal, it's invisible.
Like it's a private lordship rather than a public.
Jesus Lord of All00:03:35
And it's crazy.
It's scary to see that Lord of all replaced with Lord of my heart.
Yeah.
There are two observations to make here.
One of them is that this is effectively secularizing the gospel.
In secularization, There are a variety of definitions of it, but basically, it says that religion is a private matter.
You're welcome to have it if you want to, but keep it out of public life.
If our concept of Christianity is it's just about personal salvation, maybe personal morality, we have secularized the gospel.
We have bought into the lie of secular culture.
We have ceded territory that belongs to Jesus to the secular world.
Amen.
The second observation is that it really reflects an utterly defective view of salvation.
We think of salvation, and this is a problem with evangelicals across the board.
We think of salvation pretty much exclusively in terms of forgiveness of sins.
We've got a very forensic legal understanding of what salvation is.
That is really, really important.
And I don't want to downplay the significance of that, but it's only the beginning.
If you go to Europe and you go to a Gothic cathedral in France, let's say Chartres or Reims, or, well, I can't do Notre Dame anymore.
But if you were to go there, what you would find is the main door to the west has got boatloads of symbolism attached to it.
It's to the west, which is where the sun sets.
So it's symbolic of the end of the world.
And when you enter from the west, you're entering from the end of time.
And over the main door, you will see Christ on his Enthroned in heaven, either the scene from Revelation 4 or Christ judging people, you know, the final judgment.
That's what's over the door.
And so when you go in there, there's a lot of theology right on that door.
And you could spend a lot of time at the west door, at the vestibule in there, looking at everything there and studying it.
But if you want to get to the real jaw dropping part of a Gothic cathedral, You've got to get inside into the nave, into the main body of the church.
That is where you will be absolutely awestruck at what they did, at how they managed to do this.
Evangelicals are stuck at the door, they never, or very few of them, go all the way in to see the real glories.
Of the kingdom to see the real glories of the church, it's like being stuck at the west door.
Like I said, it's great, it's interesting, it's fascinating, lots of good theology, and all of that.
But you're missing the best part if that's where you leave it.
That's really good.
It makes me think I love Pilgrim's Progress, it makes me think of the wicket gate.
And if Pilgrim had just stopped there and you know, goodwill thrust his hand, and you know, with all my heart, are you welcome?
You know, are you willing to welcome me with all my heart?
Eternal Vigilance Required00:07:22
And if he had just you know, grabbed his hand, stepped inside, sat down.
And called it done.
It'd be kind of a boring book.
I mean, still from the city of destruction, the slew of despond, there would still be a lot.
You're right.
We could fascinate ourselves and delve into a lot of good theology and still plenty of beauty.
But we'd be missing a lot.
We'd be missing the delectable mountains, we'd be missing the celestial city.
Here's a challenge for you and your listeners read through Paul's epistles, the guy we get our doctrine of justification by faith from.
And notice how often he uses the phrase in Christ or with Christ, and notice all of the things that are associated with it.
If you really look and you see everything that is said there, it does two things.
First of all, it tells you that we have literally every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.
But, you know, so we have to maintain our connection to Christ, it's branches and vine image, it's all of those kinds of things.
But what it says we have in Christ is a lot more than just forgiveness of sins.
That's mentioned almost incidentally.
There is so much more riches that are involved in our salvation that we just completely miss because we do not understand the lordship of Christ.
We've privatized it, we've reduced it simply to salvation.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I completely agree.
Let me ask you one more question in our episode.
There's a phrase that The founders seem to be fond of saying, and that you have quoted, that says that eternal vigilance is the price that we pay for our liberty.
What do the founders mean by this, that eternal vigilance as the price that we pay for our liberty?
And what are some specific ways, kind of getting as present day, speaking to our culture, our society, what are some ways that the church has failed in this eternal vigilance?
What do you think?
Well, once again, at this point, we're dealing with the idea of original sin.
The fact is, as Lord Acton famously said, power tends to corrupt absolute power, corrupts absolutely.
You have to constantly, eternal vigilance really involves watching what your government is doing and not letting it get too big, not letting it overstep its bounds, not letting it get too big for its britches, because government always tends toward tyranny.
Okay, that's fundamentally what that needs.
We, you know, I see that quote used a lot, but very few people really think about its implications.
Its implications really have to do with the fact that you can't trust people with power.
And what we see, I would say that we have really dropped the ball on this.
The church has been more than happy.
This is really dating to the 60s, but coming out of the Golden era of liberal Christianity in America, which is the 1950s, the church has been very happy to subcontract out its responsibilities to the government.
Yeah.
And as a result, the things that the church is supposed to be doing, like caring for the poor and the needy and so on, are now in the hands of government, and government is ill equipped to do them.
But the government is more than happy to take whatever power you're willing to cede it.
And we have been consistently ceding power to the government.
Let me ask you this question.
I just actually posted this on Facebook.
When we talk about giving to Caesar what's Caesar's and giving to God what's God's, what belongs to Caesar?
Does determining the time and place where we can worship belong to Caesar?
No.
Does determining how many people can come to worship belong to Caesar?
No.
Does determining what we can do in worship, for example, you aren't allowed to sing?
Does that belong to Caesar?
That's not even the circumstances of our worship, but that's the elements of our worship.
That certainly belongs to the church.
So, how is it that our churches have rolled over?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a great question.
So, you know, you want a concrete example of government overreach, you want a concrete example of why eternal vigilance is necessary.
What I am abundantly concerned about is that, however well intentioned, and I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, however well intentioned these government restrictions are, they have established a precedent that, given the tendency of government toward corruption and tyranny because of the problem of sin in the world,
we can't trust them not to use this to push.
Other things on the church that are not justifiable by the pandemic, but by other things that they're going to claim are national priorities.
And we've already seen examples of this.
Right.
The Equality Act is coming.
The Equality Act will be a great example.
Yeah.
And don't underestimate the impact of the Equality Act.
Ministerial exemptions will get ministers off the hook, maybe, but it won't get people who work in the church who are not ministers.
It won't protect churches from being required to hire there.
And it certainly won't apply to non church Christian institutions, parachurch ministries, groups like Focus on the Family, for example, or Christian colleges and universities.
And even an organization like I've got a lot of respect for Hills, Dale, Grove City, these places that don't take federal funding.
But it's not going to stop with federal funding, it's going to go the next step to accreditation.
And if you lose accreditation, you are out of business as a college.
And I can pretty well guarantee if the Equality Act passes, the accreditation agencies are going to say, okay, you have to abide by the terms of this for accreditation or you are unaccredited.
The consequences of this are absolutely massive.
And yet, given the church's track record of rolling over at every government intrusion, I don't really see them having the backbone to put up a fight.
Finite Ministry Support00:10:04
Yeah, me neither.
At the same time, I am hopeful and encouraged, at least in respects to, I think that at least some Christians are starting to wake up.
I think, well, I see it as a winnowing.
You know, the Lord sovereignly prunes.
I think he's used COVID.
I think he's used Black Lives Matter.
He's used multiple things, especially in this last year, as his winnowing fork and separating the wheat from the chaff.
And I think what we found is that a lot of the numbers are numbers and our ranks that we boasted of.
weren't actually there.
So we're working with less than perhaps we were claiming, less people than we actually thought we had.
But the ones that we do have, the remnant, if you will, is waking up and getting, I think, angry and a righteous anger.
So I'm hopeful, but we need voices.
We need guys like John Knox.
We need fighters.
Let me just ask one more thing, because you just got me thinking with, you know, The church caring for the poor.
And, you know, if the church, you know, any of these spheres, autonomous, you know, sphere sovereignty, if any of these spheres fails in its responsibilities, its duties, then there's always going to be the temptation of another sphere to encroach and to step in, and government tends to be that sphere.
What about, though, I just, the thing that's difficult, so like caring for the poor, you know, the church has, we have some pretty clear conditions that God gives us in His word, you know, like, I mean, I think of just 1 Timothy 5, you know, it's like, Care for the poor.
And the first implicit question is, who's the poor?
And then what we see in 1 Timothy 5, and I'm not saying that this is, because we can obviously look at other texts and Old Testament texts, but 1 Timothy 5, a widow.
And to make the widow's list, now, to be fair, Paul says, Galatians, as often as you have opportunity, do good to all, but prioritize the household of faith.
But then 1 Timothy 5, it's like, here are the qualifications for a widow.
She must be, he gives an age limit.
She must be this old, it doesn't count if she's the 30 year old woman, 30 year old woman.
Widow, but she needs to be this age.
She also needs to be faithful, right?
We don't just give to people who are needy, but we do as often as we have opportunity, but we're not limitless.
We're finite in our resources, and the church is finite, just like the government and everything else.
We can't just, the government doesn't know it's finite, but it is, but it just prints money.
And the church is finite, also like the government, but tends to know it maybe a little bit better than the government.
And so there's only so much, and so we prioritize, we have these regulations from God's word.
And so I just think about the masses, the population, the people, when you have two entities, two spheres, and one is rightly instituted by God to care for the poor, and one is not, namely the government.
But this one that actually it is their right has stipulations and conditions.
And then this one says, no conditions.
We won't give you a drug test.
We won't give you anything.
You don't have to live a holy life.
You don't have to do this.
You don't have to do that.
You know what I mean?
So, part of it, I think the church fails, but part of it is like our constitution, all these, you know, written for a moral population.
And the more that morality, you know, erodes in the population as a whole, it's like even if the church steps up its game and is caring for the poor righteously, according to God's word, and rightly prioritizing because it is finite, if somebody's immoral and they look at government will give me money and I don't have to do anything, church will give me money, but I have to get my life together.
You know what I mean?
Do you have any thoughts on that?
Well, I'd like to point out just a couple of things.
One of them is that Jesus tells us that we're to give to whoever asks of us without expecting return.
He talks about how God does good to the righteous and the unrighteous, and God expects us to do the same thing.
So when you look at the history of the church, the church.
Has taken care of the poor.
It has worked at various times to distinguish between the worthy poor and the unworthy poor, and to support particularly the worthy poor, but not the others.
I mean, so there have been distinctions drawn there.
But the other thing to keep in mind is that I don't know the current numbers, but a while ago I ran into statistics that said that charitable organizations use 70% of their income.
For the work that they're doing, the government uses 30%.
Wow.
Because there's so much overhead.
So, what that means is it is economically inefficient to work through the government because the government is ill equipped to do this.
It's not what it's supposed to be doing.
Christianity, also, along with the church, it's also worth noting that Christianity created the first charitable institutions.
In world history.
So people had always given alms to the poor, but organized systematic hospitals, orphanages, things like this are the invention of the Christian church.
So it doesn't have to be the church itself that is doing the work.
There is space for these kinds of charitable institutions.
And that is an option that we can talk about.
But it still is often the work of the church.
In the sense that the church is Christians who truly care about that, that's helpful.
That's helpful, yeah.
So, you know, we have Catholic hospitals, Catholic charities, um, you know, things like that is one example, but there are also other denominations that do similar kinds of things.
Catholics get a lot of press because they're big, but but there are others that that do the same thing, yeah.
Yep, that's really helpful.
Well, let's um let's go ahead and conclude.
And as I told you before, we started recording, um, our typical practice with theology applied is that.
That we have a bonus question.
And so we encourage people to sign up for our club membership.
We call it our responders.
If you feel so inclined and you're one of our listeners today and you'd like to support this ministry so that we could produce and create more content like this with biblically qualified guests like Glenn Sunshine, we need your prayers and we need your support.
And as an incentive and our gift to you, we are creating a bonus reel of content that only our club members, our responders, can access.
And so, this is our bonus question for our responders, our club members.
I'm going to go ahead and say it just to whet everyone's appetite, to throw out a little of incentive here.
We already were starting to get at it a little bit, so maybe we could just go a little bit deeper with the Equality Act.
So, Glenn, our bonus question is could you just spend a little bit of time briefly explaining the Equality Act and offer your personal prediction for what you believe some of the effects might be on the church, but also the society at large?
So, that's our bonus question.
And let's go ahead and conclude our episode by Glenn giving you the final word.
How can people be praying for you and how can they follow your ministry?
Okay, well, first of all, following the ministry is easier.
I am easy to find on Facebook.
I accept, unless there's some obvious red flag, pretty much everybody who sends a friend request.
Along with that, I have a ministry that I run myself, it is Every Square Inch Ministries.
That's at e square inch, E S Q U A R E I N C H dot org or dot com.
There's also the theology podcast.
All of those are good ways to find me.
In terms of prayer, I'm actually retiring from my position at the university at the end of this semester.
And I'm retiring specifically so that I can put more focused time in teaching, writing, and speaking to the Christian world.
I want to, I really believe God is calling me into more active and direct ministry, and I can't do that with a full time job at the university.
So I'm kind of stepping out of the boat here.
So, prayer for future ministry opportunities and, frankly, not to be too crass about it, for support.
Maybe some ministry opportunities that pay.
Yeah, yeah, there you go.
So, those would be some of the most important prayer items for me currently.
Great.
Okay.
Well, Glenn, thank you so much for coming on the show.
It's an honor to get to speak to you, and I've benefited, you know, For this evening, getting to speak to you face to face, I've benefited from your ministry, especially the Theology Podcast.
I forgot that you were on that before we started recording, but then I remembered that, and that's one of my favorite podcasts.
So thank you so much for coming on the show and everything that you do.
Again, thank you for having me.
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