Glenn Sunshine and Pastor Joel Webben dissect the Democrats' playbook for persecuting Christians, defining civil tyranny as state usurpation of God's authority over conscience. They trace unalienable rights to medieval theology and John Locke's resistance theory, warning that privatized faith cedes public spheres to the state, causing societal collapse like the fractured African American family. Addressing Romans 13, Sunshine argues submission is conditional on magistrates punishing evil, predicting the Equality Act will force Christian institutions to violate their beliefs. The discussion highlights a "winnowing" process revealing genuine believers, asserting that while charity must follow biblical stipulations, the church remains a necessary threat to evil powers through righteous anger and vigilance against encroachments on religious liberty. [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 Boundaries00:15:08
Hi, this is Pastor Joel Webbin with Right Response Ministries, and you're listening to another episode of Theology Applied.
Now, in this episode, we're doing a blast from the past.
This is one of my all time favorite episodes of Theology Applied that we've ever aired.
Many of you have not seen it before.
You need to see it.
It's not just as relevant, it's more relevant, by far more relevant today than the day that we previously aired it.
If you've watched it before, it's probably been a while.
It probably wouldn't hurt if you watched it again.
The special guest is Glenn Sunshine.
He's the author of Slain Leviathan.
He's a professor, a speaker, a preacher.
He is chalked filled with so much biblical wisdom.
Now, the title of the episode is This Do Not Comply, the Democrats' Playbook for Persecuting Christians.
Do not comply, the Democrats' Playbook for Persecuting Christians.
Persecution is not coming to America, persecution is already here.
Tyranny is Is running rampant.
And Glenn Sunshine and what he says in this episode is so timely for where we're at as a nation and where we're at as the church today for equipping Christians to have courage and boldness in the face of persecution, in the face of tyranny, in the face of the authoritarian, tyrannical government that we currently face.
You're in for a treat.
Enjoy.
Real quick, before we get started, if you would prayerfully consider supporting Right Response Ministries, we would be incredibly grateful.
You can do so by giving a gift of any amount at rightresponseministries.comslash donate.
If you're not able to support this ministry financially at this time, you can still support us in a great regard by simply subscribing to our YouTube channel, clicking the bell, and of course, sharing our content with all your friends and family.
We need your help, and we pray that you would consider supporting us in this endeavor.
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 guests?
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, a 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.
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 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, kind of, I think it like, you know, you're a redneck if, you know, like, you know, you're tyrannical if blank, like, 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 it means to be 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 the well, 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.
Okay.
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'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?
Adam, well, first of all, there is the command to tend the garden and eat the fruit.
So, yeah, tend and 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.
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, virtus in Latin.
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 a walk and went back to Aristotle for that one.
Active Rights and Virtue00:03:10
Gotcha.
I appreciate what you were saying in terms of property rights, the way you were broadening it in 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.
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, expertise.
We're saying his property rights over his labor supersede any pseudo right to.
Healthcare.
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.
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 health care 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.
Welfare Collapsed the Family00:05:39
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.
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?
If indeed it's true that certain fathers, 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?
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, 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 father of their children.
Well, because you see, now they're trying to do it right because they assume that if the father is 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 none policies of the federal government.
So they created the crisis in family by that policy, which 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.
Checks and Balances in Government00:10:17
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 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 intellectual, 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 he 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 that 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?
Yeah.
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, 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 branches that are, 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.
And in some way, it kind of ruins the traditional way of watching football.
I don't know.
Just throwing that out there.
Well, again, the idea is that the different branches of government should be in competition with each other.
And instead, what happens?
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.
I 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.
Secularizing the Gospel Message00:08:00
Of Christian political theology.
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.
And 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 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.
Okay.
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.
Right.
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 saying that all the submission language from citizens to civil government in Romans 13, but 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 things that I think, you know, Paul is assuming in Romans 13.
Submit to civil governments.
And, you know, 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, like, you know, that would you have no fear, you know, of the government, you know, 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, Would you have no fear of the one who rules over you?
Then 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, going right back to Jesus' words render to Caesar things that are Caesar and to God 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 God's.
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've 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 government's.
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 someone, 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?
Christ is not merely the head of the church.
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 that he is still the kingdom is there with him in him.
Okay.
So, so if 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?
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.
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 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 Lord.
And it's crazy, it's scary to see that Lord of all replaced with Lord of my heart.
Yeah, there are.
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.
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.
What salvation is.
That is really, really important.
Ceding Territory to the World00:03:45
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 Rams, 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 enthroned in heaven, either the scene from Revelation 4 or Christ judging people, 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.
The cathedral is the kingdom, getting your sins forgiven is the doorway.
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.
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?
And if he had just, you know, grabbed his hand, stepped inside, sat down and called it done, you know, it'd be kind of a boring book.
I mean, still from the city of destruction, the slough of despond, you know, and, you know, 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.
We'd be missing.
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.
Eternal Vigilance Against Sin00:12:13
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 it simply.
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 Hillsdale, 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.
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'd 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, our 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 the church caring for the poor.
And if the church, any of these spheres, autonomous, 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 then the first implicit question is, who's the poor, you know, and then what we see in 1 Timothy 5, and I'm not saying that this is, you know, because we can obviously look at other texts and Old Testament texts, but 1 Timothy 5, you know, a widow,
And to make the widow's list.
Now, to be fair, if 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 widow, but she needs to be this age.
She also needs to be faithful.
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 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.
And we'll just, you know what I mean?
So part of it, I think the church fails, but part of it is like our constitution, all these things, 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, it 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% 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 often the work.
But it still is often the work of the church in the sense that it is Christians who truly care about it.
That's helpful.
That's helpful.
Yeah.
So, you know, we have Catholic hospitals, Catholic charities, 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 there are others that do the same thing.
Yeah.
Yep.
That's really helpful.
Well, let's.
Prayer for Future Ministry00:08:39
Let's go ahead and conclude.
And as I told you before, we started recording our typical practice with Theology Applied is 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 is 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, I accept 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, before 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, you know, 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.
Hi, this is Pastor Joel Webben with Right Response Ministries wishing you a very Merry Christmas.
This year of our Lord 2021, God has far exceeded all of our wildest expectations.
On our YouTube platform alone, we've reached this year 1.2 million views, and that's aside from all of our other social media platforms.
And I've been wondering about this why is it that people have found our content and our ministry to be helpful?
The Puritans believed that a minister of the word had not faithfully preached God's word unless his sermon was composed of at least three parts.
Number one, exegesis of the text.
Number two, doctrine, drawing out and emphasizing specific theology and doctrines within the text.
But number three, read any of the Puritan works from John Owen to Thomas Watson to Richard Baxter, and you will find at the end of their writings, at the end of their books, and at the end of their sermon manuscripts, application.
Application.
It's a text with exegesis, it's doctrines fleshed out, but then it's those truths applied.
To every single realm of human life and nothing less.
Our nation is desperate for God's commandments, God's precepts, God's word to be applied to culture, to be applied to politics, to be applied to economics, to be applied to the marketplace, to be applied to all these things.
And that's been our flagship show.
As I'm sure you're aware, with Right Response Ministries, the show that most of you tune in for is called Theology Applied.
When I came up with that idea, I didn't feel like I was even coming up with an idea.
I thought this was the most basic idea you could ever have.
It feels inauthentic or deceitful to even call it an idea that makes it sound like it was innovative or it was some kind of amazing creation.
Theology applied, isn't that what Christians have always done?
Apparently, not.
Not anymore.
Because when we apply the Word of God to areas of human society that don't want God's Word, All of a sudden, there's conflict.
When you start applying God's law to the medical field, when you start applying God's law to how people should vote, when you start applying God's law to Roe versus Wade, when you start applying God's law to economics, to socialism, to all these other things, then all of a sudden, people are bothered.
You know why people are bothered?
They're bothered when the church becomes a threat.
Jesus was crucified.
Because Jesus was a threat.
He was a threat to the kingdoms of this world.
He was a threat to the wisdom of this age.
He was a threat to principalities and to rulers and to governing officials.
Jesus was a threat then.
And if we would only preach Him, if we would only preach Christ again today, He will be a threat to all His enemies once more.
God is supreme.
He has something to say.
Will we open our mouths?
Will we reflect?
His image?
Will we reflect His truth?
Will we preach the whole counsel of God?
By God's grace, that's what we've done.
And I believe that's why we've grown.
That's why you like our ministry.
That's why you've been willing to be generous and support our ministry.
And so we want to continue.
And we don't want to just continue in the way that we have.
We want to expand and multiply our impact, our content, our reach in every single regard.
But we can't do it without your help.
You've been so encouraging in your comments, your emails.
You've prayed for us, you've cared for us, and you've generously supported us.
But if it's not too much to ask, I humbly request that you would prayerfully consider financially supporting us at the end of the year once more, and that you would pray that we would remain faithful.
The last thing I want is for this ministry to grow, but for me to shrink in cowardice.
I pray that God kills this ministry tomorrow.
If I'm going to be a man who compromises, so pray that the ministry grows, but pray for me personally.
I'm asking you pray for Joel.
Pray that I would be courageous.
The righteous are as bold as lions.
Pray that I would not shrink back and that I would continue to apply the whole counsel of God to the whole of human life.
Pray that this ministry would be a threat and that we would faithfully equip Christians all over the world to likewise.
Be a threat, a threat to every principality, every evil power, every wisdom of this age, every lofty opinion, every ruler who sets his face against the lordship of Jesus Christ.