The Magdeburg Confession

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm still woe. On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing the Magdeburg Confession. This is a document that was written in fifteen fifty during a conflict between the Holy Roman Empire and a Lutheran city state, basically just a city, wasn't even a city-state. The reason that we are visiting a five century old document document is because there is some applicability to the arguments that were made to our lives today, to current political conflicts. It's something that comes up periodically, the government's doing something bad, what do we do? And And so before we get into the meat of the Magdagberg confession, which was the beginning of what you've probably are familiar with,

1:25 the lesser magistrate doctrine, that is something that basically originated at this point and then was evolved over the next few decades into what became known as the lesser magistrate doctrine. Before we get into it, I want to make sure that people don't get the wrong impression of us Of us going back and talking about an old document, you might notice that it's actually pretty rare that Stone Choir episodes do something like this. We don't do a lot of history, we don't do a lot of rehashing of old arguments, and it's not that we're novelty seeking. For one, you can generally find good coverage of good basic stuff other places. Yeah, we did the baptism and communion episodes because a bunch of

2:05 people asked for it. We want you to be Lutheran, but this podcast doesn't exist to bully anyone to being Lutheran. People ask why are you guys different with the sacraments? So we gave the Lutheran case and we think the scriptural case for those things. But for the most part we don't touch on things that are pretty well settled. Also, it's really important to me not to perpetuate the notion that exists in so many minds today that I can only think or believe something if a bunch of old guys agreed. So so often I see throughout the religious discourse, guys find some old book, they find some old author, and they see some argument from him they like and get really excited and say, Hey, this is great.

2:49 I now have permission to think this thing that I already thought because this dead guy said so. I hate that. I absolutely loathe it. It is an excuse for people to be lazy. The reason that we are talking about the Magderberg Confession today is to point to the argument that they make and the framework that they lay out for establishing or evaluating whether or not a government is a good and godly government and when it's not, how do we handle that situation? Because that's very much a live issue in any century, in any place, in any political context, it's always a live issue. This government's doing something bad. What do we as Christians do when we have a duty to God? But we're not pointing to it because a bunch of dead

3:30 guys said it, so that makes it okay for us to think it. That's absolutely not the case. One of the reasons that so many of the arguments that we make on make on Stone Choir are just our arguments is precisely because we don't have any credentials or particular credibility or any reason for you to believe us just because we said it. So what that does is it frees you to disbelieve us, to challenge what we're saying, to actually think about it, which is something that we don't necessarily think we have the freedom to do once old old dead guy said something. I think one of the reasons that so many pastors lean on the writings of other better men, dead men, is that it lets them share something that's interesting knowledge.

4:10 But the danger there is that when they make someone else's arguments, as a pastor in a theological context, there's always going to be the incentive to bind people's consciences with whatever is said. Here's an argument. Here's a dead guy's argument. He made an argument from the Bible. I'm making it to you as your pastor. So now you have to do this or you're going to hell because you're sinning if you disagree. There's none of that with a podcast. If you disagree with us, we've said many times I think you're going to hell. Even if I think you're wrong. Because if I thought that you were right, I wouldn't have said the thing that you disagree with. But the fact that there's a degree of equality between the listener

4:44 and the speaker in the case of a podcast, is lost as soon as you delve into old stuff. Where you know it's famous. The Magdeburg Confession has a Wikipedia article. It's been now thankfully reprinted fairly recently and translated. It was actually lost for a while. Like knowledge existed, but it wasn't in active use. It's important that although we are pointing to something old, I don't want to reinforce people thinking, well, okay, it's old, so I'm gonna believe it. That's just it's silly. There's so much of that in the way that men try to operate and it's exhausting. Because it's not thinking. If you're just borrowing somebody else's thoughts, you're you're basically doing what an LLM does, it's just regurgitating text that it ingested.

5:24 Please don't be that guy. So when we point to this 500 year old text, we're not encouraging anybody to be that guy. We're gonna lay out today the arguments that they made and say, well, here's why we think this makes sense. And if you look at the arguments, and for those of you want to go get a copy of it, it's worthwhile. Another thing to note, if you do read the whole thing, you're very much going to see that it is a product of historical moment moment. The context of the men in Mogdeburg in fifteen forty eight to fifteen fifty when they were dealing with the situation was a dire situation, and we'll get into the history of that. But again these were Lutherans, they were besieged by papists.

6:03 They were surrounded by Lutheran lands that had in large part ceased to be Lutheran. And that was the entire conflict here. The Holy Roman Empire come in and say, All right, Lutheranism's cancelled, Reformation's canceled, everyone's Catholic again. And these guys were saying, No, we changed our beliefs as a matter of conscience and we're not going to go back on that. And hence the bloodshed, hence the siege that we're going to get into. So people actually died as a result of the thing that was written here. And they did it as a matter of conscience. They fought, and part of the reason for them writing this was to justify why they would fight. They didn't passively resist because the papal armies were coming to destroy

6:42 their home and they fought back. And it was important to them as Christians to understand if that was illicit. Was it actually a moral thing for them to do? And some of those issues are live, potentially to some degree, but I also want to make the case as we go through the specific details of Magdeburg that although their particular historical situation involved matters of conscience with regard to church practice and religious belief, the framework that they lay out has nothing to do with the church. And the reason I point this out ahead of time is that it's very important that if someone goes and reads Magdeburg, this confession, a lazy reading would cause you to conclude, okay, well, if the

7:25 church is besieged by the state and the state is trying to enforce religion religious beliefs, then these tests apply. And that's simply nonsense. When you look at the actual tests that are laid out, the we think are reasonable tests, and you can apply your own reason to it to see what you think. Some of you probably already agree, even if you don't know the specifics, because the lesser magistrate doctrine has evolved and it came from this essentially, but it's all ultimately scriptural and it's based on headship, the notion that there is somebody at the top politically who governs a land. Yeah, we often call that the prince just a shorthand. It's not explicitly about monarchy. It's just there will be an executive who's responsible for a geographic

8:07 region politically in charge of enforcing the law, punishing evildoers. You know, Prince is far removed from our modern politics, but you know, Donald Trump is effectively the prince of the United States today. Not politically, but he's in that position to act as the executive. And thankfully as we're recording in the first week of his second term, we're seeing him actually moving more like a prince than like most presidents we've seen in the past. The authority is there, and then the question is do they use it? And when they use it, do they do it in a godly fashion? That's what the tests are about in the Magdeburg Confession. It's not about is the state being mean to the church or being mean to Christians.

8:48 The Magdeburg Confession, the reasoning applies to every man, regardless of religious belief, because it's a basically a reason proposition from hierarchy. So as we're going through this, I hope that you will focus on those parts. We're going to try to focus on them and not get sidetracked on the specific details of the battle. If you go and read it, you're going to find a lot of very nasty polemics against papists. And some nasty things are said about the Anabaptists and about the Reformed as well. They were polemic. And it was because they were besieged where they were about to be besieged, they knew that they stood a very real chance of being killed over this stuff. And all their neighbors had betrayed their own confessions.

9:26 So if you read it and you see the polemic stuff and you feel hurt by it, just keep in mind that they thought that they might be about to die because all their neighbors betrayed the confession that they had shared a year prior. And so it wasn't simply, you know, emotional tumult. It was the fact that this was a very real life and death matter in a matter of conscience. So our arguments are from conscience, they're from scripture, and they're about real-world things. What do we as Christians do when the government steps out of the line from the top. Not necessarily always from the top. You know, one of the nice things about the way the argument is laid out is that maybe you have a bad mayor.

10:04 The nice thing about that is you have a governor above him. There's someone above the local magistrate that you can go to. The real problem is when it's the emperor. When the Holy Roman Emperor or the President is the bad guy, then it gets tricky because there's no one to appeal to above him for relief. And then the resistance becomes the moral question. And so it's a live issue for us today because these are the circumstances that we are all facing in the 21st century. We saw with the COVID shutdowns, and we'll see again and other things in the future that maybe people can't even imagine yet, where the state does intervene against churches and against individuals for ungodly reasons. We have to have thought some of those things through so that

10:46 we can behave as Christians. We have to answer to God for whatever we do. And that includes how we protect our lands, how we protect our families, our neighborhoods. We have a lot of duties beyond just make sure that the right doctrine is at church. So they were fighting for all of that in Magdeburg in fifteen fifty. And the argument they lay out is one that I think stands the test of time. So we're sharing it for that specific reason, not because a bunch of dead guys said it. So now we have an excuse. Go read it. Disagree with it freely. Like that's fine. Just like you can disagree with any of our arguments. That's important. That's thought. That's actual men participating in the process of us living together.

11:28 When guys point at history and say, well, now you're bound because some guy 500 years ago said it. That's crap. That's crap. It's just simply nonsense to have to have a book from a long time ago to be able to believe something or to be obligated to believe something as was written in a book a long time ago. The only question is does this withstand reason? Does this withstand scripture? And then is does it apply? Is it useful? And that's when the matter of wisdom really comes into play because maybe it's a good idea, but it doesn't have anything to do with our circumstances. So as we go through this today, just keep that in mind. Don't take this as us saying suddenly we have to look to dead guys to believe anything and don't think that it's limited just

12:08 to the specific fact pattern that they faced in 1550 because it simply doesn't. There's a lot of lessons for us to apply because they're wisdom, their wisdom, their morality. And when you apply reason to all of that, you can see that yeah, I want this to be my idea. So we'll present this to you today for your consideration. I hope you'll find it valuable. Just don't get the wrong message. I'm belaboring that point because I hate so much how many guys delve into history and then that becomes their entire personality. If people start running around on X or whatever saying I'm a Mogdeberg Christian now. I'm gonna lose my mind. Don't do that. That's not the point. Don't say you're a stone choir Christian either.

12:47 Like it's Christian. That's what we should be. That's what we are trying to be. To adopt things that you borrowed from somewhere else is the recipe for failure. And these men were fighting for their lives and for their faith and for their consciences. That's something that we should take seriously and then hear out the arguments that they made for why they did it. Although we're focusing specifically on the Magdeburg Confession in this episode for reasons that are and will become even more obvious, what we are actually doing in this episode is laying the groundwork with regard to the Christian doctrine of resistance to tyranny. And there are a number of moving parts with regard to how you run that analysis, what Christians should and should not do, we'll

13:38 get into that later in the episode. But the episode itself is not limited specifically to the Magdeburg Confession. We're not doing a book review. We're generally not going to do book reviews. We've done one previously, and there will be exceptions to that, possibly also in the future. But that is not what we're doing in this episode. In this episode, we are going over the idea, this area of thought that has an intersection not only with Christianity but also with politics, and we'll get into that more as well, because there is a moral question here and a political question here. And those are not identical, you do not run identical analyses for the one and the other. They are separate things.

14:24 Which is something that we tend to lose sight of sometimes in Christian circles. We want to conflate the political and the religious, and they again are not identical, they are not the same thing. You have different considerations in the political realm. But to help lay some of the background for this, for those who are not familiar with this era of history, and that's probably most listeners quite frankly, this is not an area of history that is extensively studied by most in school, unless you have an interest in the Reformation era or in related matters to this time. So obviously we have the Reformation that essentially kicks off in the early 1500s with the 95 Theses. Then you have the Augsburg Confession in 1530.

15:14 That sort of gives you the broad brushstrokes, as it were, of the Reformation. We're not going over the Reformation this episode as we're not going to give a full timeline of that. But the Pope obviously is not very happy with the spread of Lutheranism, specifically Lutheranism. He also is not very fond of the Reform, but this particular issue at this particular time is very much a matter between the Roman Catholic Pope and the Lutheran Princes. In this case it winds up being one particular Lutheran city, not even the Lutheran princes, because some of them have been imprisoned at this point. I'll get to that. But the Pope goes to the Emperor. And makes a deal with the emperor to suppress Protestantism, to suppress

16:03 Lutheranism, because he sees it spreading in the Empire and he wants to stop it. And so what flows from that is what is known as the Schmalkaldic War. This is essentially a localized civil war within the Holy Roman Empire. In Germany, of course. This results in the defeat of the Lutheran German princes. Subsequent to the defeat of the Lutheran German princes in the Small Caldic War, what is instituted by the Empire is what is known as the Augsburg Interim. Essentially that sees a restoration of Roman practices in the areas that were conquered. And so obviously this is a suppression of Protestantism, a suppression of Lutheranism, and this is unacceptable, of course, to the Protestants. This is what sets the stage for Magdeburg, because Magdeburg holds out.

17:06 They do not consent to the Interim, they reject the Interim, and so they are besieged by the Imperial Forces. Eventually, what comes out of this, and this is not sort of a spoiler warning for something that happened five centuries ago, but what comes out of this is that Magdeburg essentially wins. They hold out long enough. The siege lasts about a year. About 4,000, give or take, Imperial troops die, just shy of 500 Magdeburgers die. And the result winds up being what's known as the Peace of Passau. This is sort of an early recognition by the Holy Roman Empire, not so much by the Pope yet, because he doesn't want to concede, but by the Holy Roman Empire, of Lutheranism, of some of the claims of the Protestants.

18:01 Eventually there's a fuller peace, a larger recognition of Lutheranism specifically because the recognition of the reformed comes later, but what is known as the Peace of Augsburg, and it is the Peace of Augsburg where we get Cuisregio Eus Religio, which is just Latin saying that the religion of a given territory can be decided by the authority, by the prince who reigns in that territory. And so you wind up having Lutheran lands and Roman Catholic lands, and later of course Reformed as well. This is essentially what is maintained for a number of decades until essentially the 30 Years' War. That's a topic for another time. That lays the historical background, though, for what we are discussing here.

18:58 And so we're dealing in the time period Time period after the defeat of the Lutheran princes in the Schmalkaldic War, and before the Magdeburgers, of course hold out, and then we wind up with eventually the peace of Augsburg. That is the context in which they are writing this document. And so, like Woe said, some of the things in here are polemical to a certain degree, because they're quite literally watching Imperial troops set up to siege their city. Some men have already died because there have been some skirmishes, and obviously there was just a small-scale civil war in which men did indeed die. That is the background for this confession. And so when they talk about resistance to tyranny, this is not

19:50 some abstract. This is not a thought experiment. This is not men sitting in a room and just thinking, well, what if? No, these are men who could go to the city walls and see Imperial troops getting ready to siege the city and slaughter them. This was a very concrete thing for the men writing this document and for the men who signed their names to it. And of course, signing their names to it could have very well been signing their own death warrant had they lost. But to turn to the confession itself, we're not going to go over the first section because the first section of the confession is essentially just a distillation of Lutheran beliefs. It's worth reading because it's actually a pretty good summary of them.

20:40 It is a very short summary, but we've gone over that in other episodes. It is not the point of this episode. The point of this episode is to go over the arguments for Christian resistance to tyranny, for Christian resistance, to the magistrate who oversteps his bounds, who goes beyond what is permissible for him to do. And as well already said, the core of this is that doctrine of the lesser matter. Because there's the concept of the authority being delegated and the hierarchy of authority. And so if you have someone higher up the chain who is doing something wicked, it falls first and foremost to those directly under him in that hierarchy to correct him. That's going to be relatively uncomfortable in many cases, particularly in this

21:36 one, because if you are, say, an elector in the Holy Roman Empire, well that means you have to correct the emperor. That is somewhat dangerous because he does have the authority. At least theoretically there's some complications here with how exactly the structure works, but he does at least theoretically have the authority to simply have you executed. And so this isn't something that's just easy, because by virtue of your office you can just go and do this thing. No, your life may very well be on the line. There's some very real risks inherent in these sorts of undertakings. But in some cases there's a Christian duty to do it And so there's that, again, twofold question. There's the moral consideration, the Christian question we could call it, and

22:20 then there's the political, which is a question of wisdom. Just because you can do the thing, doesn't mean that you should do the thing. Just because it's unwise to do the thing doesn't mean that you have the option not to do it. Because if you have a moral duty to do something, then you actually don't get to run the full political analysis as it were. You can still undertake the execution of that duty in a wise manner. But you can't decide I'm just not going to do that because it would be unwise. If you have a moral duty to do something, it is incumbent on you to do it, even if you know that the outcome is going to be bad for you. Which if you have to go to the emperor and correct him, the outcome may very well be bad for you.

23:12 But you still have a duty to do it, assuming that in this particular hypothetical case, you do in fact have that moral duty. And so essentially the core of the analysis here for the moral analysis in the Magdeburg Confession is four different levels of of violator, four different levels of a superior magistrate who is overstepped in some fashion. And it goes from least bad to most bad. And And the fourth level would be the one where you have that moral duty to act. And so it's no longer simply a matter of wisdom there. It is a matter of you have a duty to do something because of what this tyrannical magistrate is doing, because of how far and in what ways he has overstepped his boundaries. The first level is the simplest one.

24:12 All men have weaknesses. All men have predilections, have certain temptations into which they are more likely to give. We're all sinners. That includes magistrates, and so magistrates are occasionally going to do things they should not do. They are going to do things that are in fact sinful. However, we as Christians, this is the moral analysis, we as Christians have to bear with their weaknesses and still submit to that rightful authority they hold by virtue of their office, even when they sin. That's not to say that we participate in their sin, because that's an important caveat with the first and the second level here. You are to submit to that magistrate still, as long as you can do so without joining in his sin.

25:06 Now, if you are the lesser magistrate under him, you can very well go to him and say, You are sinning, you need to stop doing that. You need to do X, Y, and Z, or not do A, B, and C, whatever it happens to be. And you probably do have a Christian duty to do that, because there is that general duty to rebuke your brother when he is in sin, to correct him, so that he can return to the correct path. You're not doing it just because you feel like correcting him, you're doing it to help him because he is your brother. The next level would be would be not just the natural weakness that men have, but a particularly bad magistrate, someone who engages in atrocious and notorious violations. This is a magistrate who goes above and beyond, as it were,

26:01 not simply violating rights or the law because of his natural proclivities or weakness But this is a wicked man. You are still generally to submit even to that wicked man. Not if doing so causes you to participate in his sin, of course, that is the same caveat as with the first level here in the second. But because of the sort of harm that would come with rebellion, because rebellion is generally always a wicked thing, and that's one of the major considerations in all of this. Not just as Christians, but as men, we should never want to engage in rebellion, because rebellion is always going to cause significant harm. Often it is going to cause greater harm than simply suffering the sort of harm against which you would be rebelling, and that is

26:56 the case here for the second level. The third level is where things start to be less of a matter of wisdom and more of a matter of moral duty or said another way, a matter of moral duty that can be executed in wisdom because there's that consideration there of the two different types of wisdom as it were. Wisdom in choosing whether or not to do something versus wisdom in choosing how to do it when it is incumbent on you to do it. And so the third level if the magistrate is wicked to such an extent that what he is doing forces you, as the lesser magistrate, to participate in his sins, then you have a duty not to do that. You have a duty to reject participation in his sins. You have a duty to do something.

27:50 You have a duty to defend those against whom he is committing these wicked acts, whatever it happens to be. It is going to be a matter of wisdom how you do that, but it is no longer a matter of whether or not you are permitted or required, because of the fact that he is forcing you to participate in his sins, you are required to act at this level. And then the fourth level, of course, would be essentially the sort of magistrate who is acting on behalf of Satan himself. This is someone who is attacking the church, attacking Christianity, drawing men to open and notorious sin. This is the level that was in play with regard to Magdeburg. Because what you had was the Pope corruptly acting in concert with

28:44 the Emperor to attack and murder Christians? This is a magistrate who has gone so far beyond his bounds, who has exceeded his authority to such an extent that he is no longer an instrument of God and has become instead an instrument of the devil. In this case, there is an affirmative moral duty to resist. And again, there is that wisdom consideration. And the wisdom is how you go about resisting that. Not whether or not you resist it, but how you go about doing so. And to make sure that I've been clear with what I've said, we are still talking about those who are in that hierarchy of authority. This becomes somewhat difficult in our current context in most of the Western world because the men who wrote the Magdeburg Confession didn't even have democracy in

29:40 mind. That was not a thing. They weren't thinking about representative government as we think of it. Of course, there was some sort of representation in the Holy Roman Empire because you had electors and things like that, but different from what we have today. And so today some of these questions are a little more difficult, a little more challenging to assess. Because who is the lesser magistrate? We have the obvious hierarchy that we can see, we have the president at the top, we have the vice president, we have the Senate, we have the House of Representatives, we have governors, we have mayors, on down the chain. But at the same time, we have a political system in which basically all adults participate because we have universal suffrage.

30:32 And so to a certain extent, every man is a lesser magistrate, granted all the way at the bottom of that hierarchy, but that But that does devolve certain duties to every single Christian man. And of course I am specifically saying Christian men, I am not using that as a generic term here, because this is a matter of headship, as Woe said in his opening. So this is not a matter for women, it's not a matter for children, this is a matter for men. Because only a man can be head. And so in our context, in the context of a democratic system, there is a certain duty that devolves all the way down to the individual man. Depending on what sort of violator a given magistrate is, it may be incumbent on individual Christian men to do something.

31:30 There may be a moral duty to act. There is still that wisdom consideration in how you act and what you do. That is always the case. God does not call us to be fools. We want to be very clear about that. Just because you have a duty to do something does not mean you have a duty to be an idiot. Hopefully, you will avoid doing that. We in fact strongly advise you to avoid doing that. But in our system, the hierarchy does run all the way from the top, the president, in the US case, down to individual men. And to some degree that's always been the case. Because even in some system like the Holy Roman Empire, you had the Emperor, then you had electors, you had princes, depending where you lived, you had all the way on down to they still in

32:22 fact had mayors and things like that. But then individual Christian men still had duties. Because if your mayor was corrupt, if your mayor ordered you to participate in sin, you have a Christian duty not to do that. You have a Christian duty to resist. What the Magdeburg Confession gives is essentially a framework for thinking about these issues. It is a useful document to read. It is not something, again, as to echo woe. It is not something that we are saying, read this, memorize it, use these exact steps, run this analysis, and you'll get the answer. That's not what this is. As with many of the other episodes that we do, this is a matter of learning how to think about a particular type of

33:10 issue. And so the Magdeburg Confession is useful because it gives a very concrete, a very real world example of these things coming into play. And so you can look at something that was not simple, certainly, for the men involved. You have the emperor involved, you have the pope involved, you have imperial troops on one side, you have formerly imperial troops on the other side, you have a somewhat independent city, this was a complicated matter, and these were Christian men attempting to navigate these things. What we face today is also complicated. Because in some ways, our government is deeply wicked. But in other ways, our government is still our government. Our government still holds rightful authority.

34:06 And so Christians are not to rebel against rightful authority. But Christians also cannot participate in sin. And so it's not a simple matter. The Magdeburg Confession serves as a useful tool for Christians to think about these matters, to think about these issues. How do we approach these things as Christian men? How do we run the analysis of what is morally permissible or what is morally impermissible? And then how do you approach that with wisdom as we are commanded to do in Scripture? We're not commanded to be fools. Again, to repeat that, it's an important point. We are commanded to be wise as serpents, to be crafty even. We are not commanded to act foolishly, and so we have to think through these issues, we have to consider these sorts of things,

35:03 because it is not a simple analysis. It is not just here are your bullet points, check them off, and then you have your answer. It's easier, certainly, if someone gives you a checklist and just says, if you do this, then this, then that. That's not how life works. And it's certainly not how things work when we're dealing with moral issues and political issues, which is what we are certainly dealing with in this episode, when we're dealing with how Christians are to navigate real world issues with regard to those who usurp authority or exceed the bounds of their authority. Now, of course, some are going to think of Romans 13, and we will get to that in a little bit in the episode. It is not a simple matter of just submitting to all earthly

35:52 authority regardless of what they do. That is an incorrect interpretation of Romans 13. But at the same time, rebellion itself is wicked. And so we cannot be rebels. That is not something Christians should ever aspire to be or even tolerate. But there are times where you do have to resort to resistance, because certainly the Magdeburgers took up arms against a wicked and oppressive Caesar. That was necessary. That was their Christian duty. And so as we navigate these issues, we have to recognize the complexity of the matter and the complexity of the analysis and not resort to simple answers because they're simple, because they're easy. We have to actually think through the matter, run the assessment, and

36:49 then navigate these in not just a Christian way, but also a wise way. As we've discussed in the episode on violence, obviously there are times where violence is necessary in life. There are times when men must be violent to stop evil. And that was the predicate notion that these men carried into this siege. They drafted and published this in April of fifteen fifty. By August they were under siege, and that siege lasted thirteen months. So as Corey said, there had already been skirmishes, they knew that this was coming. And part of the reason for the first portion of the Magdeburg Confession, just being an exhibition of their Lutheran faith, was to establish look, we're not anarchists. We are not godless rebels seeking to tear down the high places.

37:40 They were specifically pleading with the emperor himself directly to say we want to obey you. They were begging the emperor, Charles V to behave in a fashion that they could obey. And they said, basically, if you take off of the table, forcing us to be papists, we will obey everything else. We are obeying everything else. In every regard, as much as they could, they were obeying what was commanded of them, but not that one thing. And so the reason that they were writing this was that their home was being besieged. They knew the violence was coming. Violence has already ensued before they wrote it. They knew that it would get worse. So as these men were looking out and seeing these preparations for

38:22 them to be besieged and probably killed, I mean that's how sieges are supposed to end if you don't surrender. They understood that in order for them to defend their homes and their lives, they would have to engage in violence against the king's own men, the emperor's own men. And on paper that sounds sinful. And so they had to try to figure out can we resist our do we have to just take this or is there a moral out for us to defend ourselves? Which is a terrible position for the executive to put anyone in. The prince, the emperor, the magistrate, whatever you call it, to put people in a position where they have to decide this is unjust. Do I have to also behave unjustly to keep from dying here?

39:05 And that's a position that states should never ever permit anything to get to. You know, de-escalation is not just a leftist meme, it's a good idea. When somebody's dead, they stay dead. You can't undo that. And so resorting to violence is sometimes necessary, but when it can be avoided as a matter of wisdom and as a matter of morality, it generally should be. Obviously we've talked in a past that's not remotely pacifist, but at the same time, you don't want to see violence. Violence is always necessarily destructive. There's no creation in violence. All you're creating is pain and suffering. Sometimes it must be done, but that's never desirable. Any other outcome would be preferable if possible.

39:48 So as these men were looking around and seeing what the emperor was prepared to do in the name of Rome, I'm sure they were beside themselves with moral and emotional anguish that to be in put in this position, how unthinkable, to have to face the idea that you might have to kill your countrymen not to be killed for exercising your faith. And And that was the entire impetus for them to lay out their position as Lutherans and then to make the case for here's how we calculated that we are not sinning by resisting. I think one of the key insights is Corey laid out with that hierarchy is that the notion of the lesser magistrate is not one of anarchy, but it's one of devolution. In the event that the president does something evil and he continues

40:36 to do evil things and those evil things escalate to the point that force must be employed, it doesn't automatically devolve to me to fight back. That's the key insight. And this is a key moral insight because it's the only way to keep from devolving into anarchy. If the president, if the emperor, whomever at the top, is an absolute despot and has failed every test, is just the devil's right hand in what he's doing. There's men beneath him. There are going to be more men beneath him because that's how hierarchies work. You don't have one general and then one colonel. You have a number of colonels, and they have a bunch of majors and a ton of lieutenants. That's how hierarchy works. So you know in our country, we have everyone listening in the

41:18 United States has one president, you have one of fifty governors, almost all of us are gonna have mayors, as Corey laid out. So at any point, one of those men could potentially step in and say, as it comes to my town, as it comes to my state, we will not participate and I will actively resist the evil that you are proposing. That was their key insight. It wasn't completely novel. It's just the first time that I'm aware of that someone had written it down and articulated it certainly this clearly. That we don't want to see battles and resistance and wars, particularly up and down. It's one thing when neighboring nations go to war, but in internal war where you have a state warring against its superior, that's worse.

42:04 You know, it's potentially a civil war, but it's always undesirable. And so they made sure that they came up with a scheme and a framework and a logical proposition. I don't say scheme negatively. Like here are the rules that we think will make any situation like this and generalize the specifics of our situation such that a man can look and see, yes, under these conditions, it is necessary for someone to resist, not the individual, not the pastors themselves personally, but the magistrate over the lesser domain had to do something to resist because he had a duty from God to his town, to his city. The governor has a duty from God to his state, just as the president has a duty from God to his country.

42:49 So at any point we're all participants in all of those simultaneously. It's exactly the same way race works. I'm white, I'm mostly English, I'm American. I have you know much closer relations here in this country going back hundreds of years, but to particular relatives of mine, that's a much smaller concentric circle than white or you know, European English, those concentric circles matter in exactly the same way, and they're manifest in the doctrine of lesser magistrate. At those various concentric circles, not necessarily perfectly correlating, but you're gonna find that someone closer will also have, you know, I have multiple people over me. I have a mayor, I have a governor, I have a president,

43:32 and then various intermediary bodies that are sort of peripheral, but they do come into play. in the United States as well as in England, where we got it from, you have the sheriff over a county, who's a very interesting legal authority in our system. We talked about that a little bit in a previous episode. The importance of not saying, well, okay, the president's mean, not the president's mean, but I want to downplay this. The president is Satan himself. So I'm gonna go hurt people. I'm going to go be violent. That's absolutely impermissible. And the key insight that the Magdeburg confession provides is that that's not even necessary because there's always somebody above me. And as Corey said, I don't have authority of my own, but

44:10 I can appeal. I can go talk to someone. I can raise the alarm and say, hey, you guys who are over me and beneath the ultimate bad guy that's a problem here, do something. Look at this problem, protect me, protect my community. That is what we do have the opportunity to avail ourselves of. And so the fact that they went out of their way to make sure that you know they didn't stretch scripture at all. They make their arguments from scripture and they go into ample detail, I think in some cases almost too much. they want to pull in so many peripheral anecdotes about well, in this one example, this guy did this. It's there's this appetite that so many Christians seem to have to try to plumb the depths of scripture for trivia to make some

44:52 moral point. I personally find that really dangerous. I would much rather just make the argument in my own words and not bind your conscience and let you figure it out. And if you agree, then if your conscience is bound, it's because it's obedience to God. But as soon as I start coming up with weird examples from deep in the bowels of the Old Testament, I'll say, Well, look, here's this example, you gotta do it. You're invoking the name of God in a dangerous fashion. I don't think they did it wrong. I just think they did it too much. It's a habit I see a lot today, especially in some of the reform circles. It's not bad. It's always struck me as kind of odd because it's not the strongest case for the argument.

45:26 One of the important points that they made was that I'm just gonna give you a quote here. This was nullifying one of the counter arguments against the idea that they wouldn't be able to fight back or resist. They wrote Magistrates and subjects shall be bound by shirk chains and mutual oaths, but it shall be permitted to magistrates when they want to be, to be loosed and free from all obligation, while subjects shall always be bound in all circumstances, and never be free. It shall be permitted to magistrates to exercise the utmost tyranny contrary to the laws and their oaths, but it shall not be permitted to the subjects to restrain the ravings of tyrants, in accordance with the laws. Thus the truth of our common sense and the logic of consequences

46:09 will always depend on the whims and weapons of those who have power. Now obviously that was spoken tongue in cheek. They were saying this is absurd. The idea that the subject is always bound to obey, and also the magistrate, the superior is always bound to obey God obey God, but he can just change his mind and you still have to obey once he breaks his oath. Once he's disobeying God, you have to keep obeying him. And they went on to articulate very clearly that that's basically setting God against himself. If God puts a man in a position to rule over you in a godly fashion, and then he turns against God and is doing wicked things and involving you in those wicked things, he's not acting on behalf of God.

46:49 He can't be. That's a house divided against itself. And so part of their argument rested on the moral argument that the limitations of the executive, of the magistrate, at whatever level, are going to be screwed by the duties to which he's bound. And they must always be oriented towards God. Even if it's secular, even if it's just making the trains run on time or making sure that invaders don't burn the crops, whatever duties the magistrate has, he is fulfilling them for the benefit of God's people. And that is obedience to God, whether he knows it or not. When he inverts that and starts harming God's people in various ways, and they exceed the threshold of the four part test they lay out, then their argument is that violence is necessary from the lesser

47:37 magistrate solely to protect those beneath them. And again, this is all purely defensive. It's not we're going to overthrow this guy. It's simply we must neutralize the threat. You know, in self defense legal frameworks, that's the goal. Not I'm gonna kill somebody. I have to neutralize the threat. If lethal force is necessary to neutralize the threat, then it's legally permissible. It's not you want to kill the guy and so you're gonna use lethal force. No. Then you're gonna catch a manslaughter rap because the intent there is not to protect yourself, it's to hurt him. Even though it's such a subtle and seemingly insane distinction, because if you pull the trigger, obviously someone's going to be hurt.

48:21 It's a question of intent. If your intent is I want to stop this person from hurting someone, then pulling the trigger is permissible. If your intent is I want to kill that guy because I'm mad that what he's doing is wrong, then you're suddenly in fraught legal territory. Self defense is incredibly tricky and it's legally fraught, and it's morally fraught, even when it's justified. These men understood that they had a duty to God to get this right before the siege was laid. And you know, as Corey was saying, there was the discussion around the and it's something we've talked about before in other episodes. A nation should have a unified religion. That's a good thing. We talked about households converting and then the you know, the husband

49:02 converts, the whole household converts. We've talked at great length from the very earliest episodes about how when in many cases kings or rulers, the magistrates of European lands converted to Christianity, and rapidly their people followed suit. It wasn't necessarily enforced rigidly, but the example was set, and then eventually and this is effectively the law of the land, is this new religion. So when all of these other Lutheran lands reneged on their promise to God to be Lutheran, it wasn't duty to Luther. They believed it was their Christian duty to be Lutheran and to reject the papacy. When the Emperor swept in at the Pope's orders and said, We're gonna kill you if you don't become Roman Catholic again, one of

49:48 the points that they made to emphasize that this was tyranny and not simply, well, the guy in charge gets to decide what religion we are. They pointed out that in these very same lands there were Jews and there were pagans who were tolerated. The Pope didn't care about Jews and pagans. He only cared about Lutherans. The only people he was killing were the people who refused to be Roman Catholics specifically after the Reformation. And that was part of their case that this specific instance was per se tyranny because they were leaving other people. It wasn't that everyone was being converted to the papacy by the sword. As Corey said, the Pope was mad. He was livid. He was murderously angry, specifically a Lutherans in these lands that he

50:34 claimed authority over, which was another part of the fight in the Reformation itself, that the Pope doesn't have universal authority. It was literally one of the fundamental fights. So when they said, you know what, you're leaving Jews alone, you're leaving pagans alone, and you're only coming after us proves that it is not the potentially legitimate case where the magistrate is saying everyone in my land must be Christian. That's not even a question here. Whether or not that's legitimate, they pointed out that's not what's going on here at all. If you're going to tolerate unbelievers and let them practice their own religion, but you won't let us practice Lutheranism, well, we believe we're

51:10 Christian and we believe you're murdering Christians, and because of that, it is necessary to employ violence to protect Christian lives. And that duty devolves to the lesser magistrate, and here's the case that we're making for it. The authors of the Magdeburg Confession advance essentially three different arguments with regard to why they believe, and they are correct in this, we would say they are correct in this, why they believe that there are limitations to the power of, in this case, the emperor, and why it is permissible for for the lesser magistrate to resist under certain circumstances. The three arguments are essentially an argument from definition, an argument from inference, and an argument from absurdity.

52:02 And so definitionally, essentially is the Romans 13 argument. So I'll come back to that. Inference is also drawn from Romans 13. And then the absurdity argument I'll cover briefly because it's the easiest to cover before we delve into Romans thirteen. If you argue that Caesar, that the emperor, that the president, whatever office, if you argue that he can do whatever he wants and you must always submit to his authority, then what you've effectively argued is that God sanctions sin. Because if you advance the moral argument, then That the magistrate can do whatever he wants and you must always submit, then if he sins and forces you to sin, what you're saying is that the authority granted him by God encompasses Compasses enforcing sin, which is

52:59 absurd. You can give any number of concrete examples, of course. If the magistrate says that no man is allowed to have a wife now, that all the women have to be prostitutes, this is actually an example that is given in the Magdeburg Confession, obviously, you do not have to submit to that as a Christian. In fact, you have a duty to resist at that point. So to argue that there is no limitation on the authority, on the power of the magistrate is absurd. And so that alone would be sufficient, but there are the other two arguments, definition and inference. And in order to understand those, they have to be couched in Romans thirteen, and so I'll read the relevant portion of Romans thirteen. Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is

53:56 no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain, for he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath, but also for the sake of conscience. For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are

54:45 ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to them, taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honour is owed. There have been many historically, and certainly it seems to be very popular to day, who have argued, and who indeed argue to day, that Romans thirteen gives a blanket command for Christians to submit to authority, to submit to the state, whatever the office happens to be. Now we've already seen the argument from absurdity that defeats that, but Romans thirteen is not merely a command. Romans thirteen is also a polemic. Because if you look at what is actually said in the passage that I just read, and I of course encourage you to go

55:40 and read it yourself, and I will put a link in the show notes. It actually gives a definition of what a proper authority is, what a rightful authority is. And what does it say? Well it says in the core of it, for rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. That's defining what a ruler properly is. And so a man who is a terror to good conduct, and not to bad, is in fact not actually a rightful ruler. He has overstepped, he has become a minister of Satan instead of a minister of God. And so for instance, if you were living somewhere and the authority in that area, the president, say, outlaws Christianity and forces everyone under penalty of death to convert to paganism, he is not a rightful

56:38 authority. Because what has he done? He has become a terror to good conduct and not to bad conduct. He is the inverse of what God defines here as being a rightful authority. And so you have to read Romans 13 and recognize what it is saying. It is not simply saying that first part which some modern teachers love to quote, let every person be subject to the governing authorities. And perhaps they'll move on from there and also say, For there is no authority except from God. But you have to read the rest of it, because it goes on to define what an authority a proper authority actually is. And so if some person holding some certain office does not meet this standard in the In so far as he deviates from the

57:30 standard that is set forth here in Romans 13, he is not a rightful authority. And then you run that analysis that we spoke about earlier. Again, not specifically that one, but that is the general source of analysis you have to run. What sort of violation is he committing? What sort of violator is he? Is he some sort of horrible tyrant that is actually suppressing Christianity, that is going specifically after the church, that is commanding you participate in sin? Well he's certainly not a rightful authority according to the definition we have here in Romans thirteen, and so Christians are going to have certain moral duties that flow from that. But then there is also the argument from inference, and we can

58:18 see this elsewhere in Scripture as well. The Magdeburg Confession also makes reference to Christ's words render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, render unto God that which is God's. That also implies a certain number of things. There is an inference to be drawn there. The inference, of course, is that you do not render unto Caesar that which is God's. And you do not render unto God that which is Caesar's. In that specific case there's a sort of nuance that goes along with that. This would be used polemically, in fact, against the Pope, because the Pope then and less so now because he doesn't have the power anymore, although certainly if he had the power he would make the same claims because the doctrine has not changed, in this case, he

59:06 makes claims to having authority over the states, over the nations. He makes claims to having power in the kingdom of the left hand. That is a violation. That is an attempt to take what belongs to Caesar and not really take it for God, because of course we would disagree that the Pope is working for or speaking on behalf of God. But that is essentially the claim that he is setting forth. He is saying, no, none of these things belong to Caesar. They all belong under this particular formulation of the Church, which is a violation of what Christ is saying, because he is saying, There are certain things that belong to Caesar. Ultimately, of course, yes, everything belongs to God. But here in time, and with regard to human affairs, there are

1:00:01 certain things that belong to Caesar, just as there are certain things that belong to God, which is to say there is a distinction here between the things of the left hand and the things of the right hand. If Caesar invades the domain of the church and says you must worship in this specific way, believe these specific things, Caesar is likely overstepping his bounds. There are some cases in which Caesar, in which the authority, has a duty to see that right religion is taught in his realm. Wolredi said that we went over some of that with regard to the history. But those who have authority, rightful authority in the left hand kingdom do have a duty to see that right religion is taught in their realm.

1:00:51 They will stand before God and answer for that. It would be completely ridiculous to claim that they have no authority to enforce right religion in their realm, and then also they're going to stand before God and answer for for not enforcing what they didn't have the authority to enforce. That argument would be incoherent. And so the authority must have the power, must have the right to see that what is taught in his realm is correct. He's going to stand before God and answer for that if he is wrong or if he did it in a wrong way. That's one of the things that comes along with having that sort of office. It's not just power and enjoyment with no strings attached. You get a sort of stricter judgment.

1:01:38 There's a form of that that you are going to have if you are an authority in the left-hand kingdom. But with regard to the matters of the right hand kingdom, the church does not tell the state what to do. That would be trying to take the things of Caesar out of his hands and say, no, these don't belong to you, they belong to me instead. I'm the Pope, I'm the bishop, I get to do this, I have all the authority and you have none. That is rejecting the clear words of Christ. Because when he says that you are to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, it means there are things that are Caesar's. And so the inference here is that that inverse you can't have the one taking from the speaking from the other.

1:02:25 That was the problem that we see occurring here with regard to the Emperor. Because the Emperor is coming in at, of course, the behest of the Pope, and saying No, you cannot be a Lutheran. No, you cannot practice Christianity. You cannot believe these things. Instead, you are going to do what I tell you to do. Now, of course, some of you are going to recognize there's a tension here, and there absolutely is. One of the ways that you can solve this tension, and the way that eventually the peace of Augsburg did solve this contention is by permitting princes to have a religion as the established religion in their own realms. And so that meant if you were Lutheran and your prince was reformed, you moved next door and you lived under a Lutheran prince.

1:03:22 That solved the problem. The issue with regard to the Pope is the Pope was claiming that absolutely, everyone has to believe exactly what Rome teaches. That does not leave any room with regard to Christian conscience. We're not going to argue that false doctrine is right simply because some men believe it is true. That's of course false. That's ridiculous. But with regard to these matters, similar to the question of wisdom and how you pursue your duty with regard to if you have violations of the moral law and you have a duty to act, there is a consideration of minimization of harm. With regard to rebellion, rebellion, one of the reasons that rebellion is so wicked is that it always causes harm, and the harm is

1:04:19 almost always worse than the harm that caused the rebellion caused so-called in the first place. And so you have to subject that to wisdom. You can't cause a worse harm to undo a lesser harm. That is what the Pope was attempting to do in this case, and the Emperor at his behest. If you are subjecting everyone to this same doctrine, to this same belief, and you are leaving no place for Christian conscience, what you are doing is you are telling men, you must either rebel against your conscience in submitting to this doctrine in which you do not believe, this doctrine that you believe to be false, or you must rebel against the Empire, you must take up arms. That is leaving men with absolutely no good option, because they are

1:05:16 either going to have to sin by acting against conscience, which of course Christians cannot do, or they are going to have to rebel. And if they have to rebel that is going to lead to other forms of wickedness. That is one of the reasons you want this sort of subsidiarity, you want this to be devolved, not to be handled at the imperial level, which is what was happening here. Because if, again, if you are Lutheran and your prince is not, you can move next door, or if you're Roman Catholic and your prince is Lutheran, you can move one principality over or two, whatever it happens to be, and then you can practice your version of Christianity under a prince who has said, My realm is going to be Lutheran, my realm is going to be Reformed, my realm is

1:06:11 going to be Roman Catholic. That means that men are not forced to violate their conscience or choose to take up arms. We know from Scripture Scripture is very clear about this, that there are going to be divisions in the church, we are not going to achieve complete unity of doctrine. And despite what some have claimed, we didn't even have it historically. Rome doesn't even have it today within Rome. So So that claim as well is complete nonsense. We are always going to have these quarrels. We are going to have disagreements. And so we have to act in a Christian manner with regard to those. We have We have to seek to minimize the harm without violating our conscience in the process. Because, of course, if we are forcing men to violate their conscience,

1:07:07 what we're doing is we're forcing them to sin. That doesn't mean, again, it does not mean that just because men believe in false doctrine that doctrine is acceptable. It means that there is a greater harm that we want to avoid. We should seek to convince our Christian brothers by convincing them. We don't convince them by sieging their city and murdering them. That is what the Emperor was doing here. That is why it was rightful for these men to resist, and incidentally, the Emperor had already made promises and gone back on them. This was not the first thing the Emperor did that was out of bounds, that was impermissible and immoral. He had a history of doing it at this point. And so when you look at what it means to be an

1:07:57 authority, you have to look at what scripture actually says. This is another one of those cases in which we are advocating that you read carefully. Don't just glaze over and sort of pay attention to the words as you read through it quickly. Actually pay attention to the words of Scripture because God chose those words. He didn't choose them idly, he didn't choose them without reason. He chose them specifically because they say what he wants you to know as a Christian. And so when you read Romans thirteen, it's not just saying submit blindly to whatever authority happens to be over you at any given time. Time because that's your Christian duty. I would hope that at least most Christians, and it should be

1:08:46 all Christians, but at least most Christians would recognize there was no duty to submit to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was actively wicked in almost every conceivable way. Did everything it could to destroy Christianity, did everything it could to attempt to destroy the world in so far as it was capable of doing it. There is no Christian duty to submit to that sort of wickedness. But under the supposed interpretation of Romans 13 that has become popular in certain circles, you would have had a duty to submit to Stalin, to simply submit to that sort of wickedness Regardless of what he tells you to do. That is absurd. That is not Christian. Because Romans thirteen gives you a definition of what a rightful authority

1:09:47 is. It does not just say submit. It says you submit to the rightful authority because rulers are a terror to bad conduct, not to good conduct If you have someone who is a terror to good conduct and encourages bad conduct, he is not an authority, according to the definition we have in Romans 13. And the other argument that is set forth in the Magdeburg Confession, as I've already said, is the one by inference, the fact that if there are things that belong to Caesar, then there are in fact things that belong to Caesar, and they should not be seized by others. And the inverse as well. So it's important to read these things, not just to accept whatever you're told about, you know. Well, Romans 13 says submit, and so you obviously have to submit

1:10:42 regardless. Go and read what it actually says. We're not telling you just to believe what we say, as we have said in a number of other episodes. We want you to look at what Scripture says, to look at what God has caused to be transmitted in his word, and believe what he says. That's why I read it. That's why I am going over the interpretation of it and not simply saying Well it says be subject to the governing authority, so obviously that's it. End of story. No, read it in context. God's Word is complete. God's Word gives you everything you need to know about the subjects that are addressed by God's Word. God's Word addresses what it means to be a rightful authority. It addresses it I won't say extensively, because it's obviously not a

1:11:36 very large treatment here, it's one paragraph in Romans thirteen. Yes, there are some other sections that are relevant as well, but it addresses it sufficiently if you read the words that are actually there and understand what is being said. And part of this is an exegetical tool that is important to bear in mind when reading any part of scripture, when reading really anything, because this is true with regard to other literature as well, not just for scripture, but when you have a positive statement, it imports with it a sort of inverse negative statement. And the same of course for a negative statement importing the inverse positive statement. To give a more concrete example, so it is more easily understood.

1:12:23 This is something that is going to be very recognizable, readily comprehensible to Lutherans, because this is in the book of Concord, this is in our confessions, with regard to the Ten Commandments, if the commandment prohibits something, it is also implying, it is also stating inversely that you have a duty with regard to the inverse of that negative thing, or if it tells you to do something, then you are not to do the negative things. So for instance, thou shalt not murder. Not only does that mean don't go and stab your neighbor, which is obviously the core meaning there, do not murder, but it also means that you aid your neighbor. It means you help your neighbor. You do not do things that harm your neighbor.

1:13:16 There are things that come along with that. The same is true here. With regard to what it means to be a rightful authority, and You can draw out more from that passage than just the bare words themselves. Scripture doesn't just have a surface-level meaning. There is more to it. We should expect that it's written by God. God chose these words because he wants us to believe what is said here, and this is what he wants us to know about the subject. And so we have to exercise the abilities that God has given us to interpret this, to understand this, to exegete this. With regard to authority, it is not simply a matter of well there's authority you must submit. No, the authority has duties from God, the authority has a definition

1:14:08 from God. It means something to be an authority. And if you are faced with someone in a position of authority who is not living up to the standard that God has set, then there are some additional questions. That is the point of the Magdeburg Confession. That is the point of this episode. If an authority does not meet the standard for a rightful authority that has been set by God, then it is incumbent on the Christian to figure out what sort of violator is this person? How bad is what he is doing? And whose duty is it to do something about it? Because it probably isn't your duty. But it might be your duty to raise it with the person who is above you in the hierarchy, who should then take it to the man who is above him.

1:15:03 That is how things are supposed to work, because as Woe said, if we do not respect the authority and the hierarchy that God has built into creation that just inevitably expresses itself with regard to human constructions, so civilization, society, these things form organically because God has designed creation in that way. If we ignore them, we wind up with anarchy, and there is nothing worse than anarchy. Even to submit to a wicked ruler, who is, of course, with the caveat not causing you to participate in his sins, it is better to submit to that wicked ruler than to engage in behavior that will lead to anarchy, because anarchy is the greater evil. That's that wisdom call. Will resisting in whatever means you happen to be employing, a particular

1:16:03 form of wickedness from an authority, lead to a greater evil than the one you are attempting to destroy? If so, then obviously it is not only unwise to go down that road, but it would be wicked as well, because it is in fact a sin to commit that greater wickedness. You're not making the world better, you're not solving the problem, you're creating a new and larger problem. That is why as Christians, we oppose rebellion. We are never going to advocate for rebellion because rebellion inherently Is anarchy. Anarchy creates worse conditions. It creates more and greater sins. The goal should always be the maintenance of hierarchy, the maintenance of these systems that God has built into creation for our benefit.

1:16:57 Yes, they are going to be imperfect because there are imperfect men in these offices. But what we should endeavor to do is fix the problems, not burn everything to the ground. I want to emphasize one more point about Romans thirteen. It's something that I pointed out in the past when we were talking about the Sermon on the Mount On the Mount. When Christians speak of the Sermon on the Mount, you know, beginning with the Beatitudes and these moral prescriptions that Christ provides, they're very clearly challenging teachings because they show that we're all sinners. They show that we all fall short of the glory of God. You were taught don't murder, I say don't hate. If you've hated someone in your heart, you've already murdered them.

1:17:40 That's impossible for any man to live perfectly throughout his entire life. The point that I've made in the past about the Sermon on the Mount is that that was not a lecture to governors. That was a lecture to Christians. It was not about government. It was about interpersonal behavior. Part of the Sermon on the Mount says, do not resist the one who is evil. Could you possibly apply that to a government? Could that possibly be something that a governor that a magistrate is held to? Absolutely not. If there is an evildoer and the magistrate does not resist the one who is evil, that magistrate is evil. He has failed to do one of his primary tasks. So it's an important point when we in a Godforsaken democracy are

1:18:33 talking about our participation, we cannot take things like the sermon on the Mount or Romans thirteen and apply them to the government as though these men, as though God were speaking to the government, because it's simply not the case. Romans thirteen begins, let every person be subject to the governing authorities. Paul is obviously not addressing the governing authorities here. He's addressing everyone else. The arguments that are made here are not applicable in terms of limiting, but at the same time, a godly ruler, a godly magistrate, governor, emperor, whomever, when he reads Romans thirteen, he's going to read for rulers are not a terror to good conduct but to bad. And the ruler is not going to think that he is limited

1:19:21 by that. He's going to think, well, this is my punch list. This is what I've got to be doing. Have I terrorized good conduct? Have I sinned against God as a ruler? Or have I failed to be a terror to bad conduct? That itself is a sin for a magistrate. It's not my personal job to be a terror to bad conduct, but to the emperor, to the prince, it absolutely is. And so for a prince who does not resist the one who is evil, he has failed to be a terror to bad conduct, and he's a wicked prince. This is one of the primary reason that girls are utterly disqualified from any political participation. Because no girl as part of her nature as a female is going to want to terrorize evil men. The good prince, you know, he'd been lazy for a while, and

1:20:05 he picks up Romans 13, and he reads this and he says for rulers are not a terror to good conduct but to bad and he pauses and he thinks Have I been a terror to bad conduct recently? And he realizes he hasn't. He hasn't terrorized any evildoers in a long time. He's gonna stop what he's doing and say, I'm gonna be right back, and he's gonna go terrorize some evildoers. That's him doing his job. That's something that's not inherent to a female nature, it's inherent to a male nature. Men are potentially good at that. Most men aren't particularly good at it. And some men have had that notion bred out of them. And our society is oriented to say no, you have to not resist the one who is evil, which is completely ungodly.

1:20:47 It's completely wicked. It's how Satan is burning down our society. When every time we see evil, we're told, well, you can't resist evil. Absolutely not. We have a duty to resist evil. That is the entire premise of the Magdeburg Confession. The magistrates at every level have a duty to resist evil, even when that evil is government. And in particular, it's vital that the lesser magistrate resist the evil of government because he's the only one who can do it. One of the similar passages to Romans thirteen that comes up in the Magberg Confession and elsewhere is first Peter two, which begins be subject for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperors or supreme or to governors, as they are sent

1:21:30 to punish those who do evil, and to praise those who do good. It's very similar to what Paul wrote. The important thing about Second Peter two is you have to read the rest of it and you have to understand it in the scope of what the Mogdeberg pastors were talking about. When you look at the rest of 1 Peter two, it begins with governments. It says that we the people should obey emperors as supreme or governors. Interestingly, in this passage, it acknowledges there are multiple forms of government. In whatever it is, you're going to have an executive. And then the next paragraph is about servants. Servants slaves. I shouldn't say that. I'm looking at the ESV, it's slaves. Slaves who are owned by other men, obey your masters, particularly when

1:22:11 they beat you, when they are cruel and unfair. And then it goes on and talks about wives and husbands. The wives are to submit to their husbands. Now, the crucial distinction here that gets back to what Corey said at the beginning about the arguments that the Magdeburgers were making was that in the case of a husband, she has to obey her husband unless he commands her to do something evil. He does not have absolute authority over his wife. There's never absolute authority in this life. A husband has a duty to protect her, to defend her, to command her properly, but that should never be a burden for her. It may be a burden for him to have to do more thinking and more work. But it should not be a burden to her to be commanded.

1:22:52 It is sin if he goes too far. Particularly if he commands her to do something that is sinful. The same is true of slaves, and the same is true of governments, but the difference between husband and wife, slave and master and us at the bottom of the political pile and the emperor, the prince, the magistrate, whatever at the top, is that and this is encapsulated in the Mogdiber argument, the necessity to employ violence is particular to a man's duty as it relates to external threats. Now that excludes slaves and excludes wives. If a wife has a wicked husband who's commanding her to sin, that does not give her the moral right to kill him, just as it does not give slaves the moral right to kill their

1:23:39 masters even if their masters are wicked. To the extent possible those people should obey as an example of the submission that we have to God, but they do not have the license morally to commit violence against the slave master or against the husband. It is exclusively not true in the political realm, but only because of the lesser magistrate, because there's always somebody in greater authority of you as an individual. And as we've said before, even in the case of the prince at the very top, the only person above him is God Himself. He answers to God alone for his actions, which is what puts him in a particularly precarious place. When the very top man is acting wickedly, is failing all the

1:24:24 tests, all four tests, is showing that he is an absolute tyrant, that there's nothing but evil, a Stalin. The duty of the lesser magistrate is to employ violence against the one who is doing evil. And this is the case that Corey mentioned, the reason, the specific reason the violence is permissible and in fact it's necessary in the political environment, is because there's still a duty to protect those beneath you. The mayor has a duty, the governor has a duty, there's always a duty to those beneath to protect from those above, just as with any external threat. So when evil comes, those men are still obligated to God to be a terror against evildoers. Not to embrace those who do evil, say, Oh, it's fine, I

1:25:08 forgive you. Absolutely impermissible in politics. And this is why it's really tough for us as Americans or anyone in a Western democratic society to tease this out because to the extent that we're voting, we're wearing too many hats. Most men are not equipped to deal with politics as Christians where you have duties to neighbor that are peaceful and positive, and you also have duties to violence. They're duties to kill people in certain narrow cases. And the participation of individuals in a democracy make those lines incredibly blurred because suddenly maybe I'm the one who's voting to go to war, you know, indirectly by voting for someone who's promised to go to war. When those situations arise, suddenly we as individuals become participants in a

1:25:54 hierarchy that we're at the bottom of the hierarchy, but we're pretending that we have other places. It's part of the reason that democracy is evil is that it's artificially elevating men who are not equipped by God, not called by God, not suitable by God to do those things. The other last thing I want to say about you know the Stalin case in particular, any particularly wicked king, even in the case where you have the worst king imaginable, God has still permitted that man. That doesn't mean you obey him, but when you look in scripture and you can see throughout history, scripture is replete with evil, absolutely evil kings that God permitted. He sent evil kings to harm, to punish, to destroy at the

1:26:36 least end of the scale, to chastise. But often it goes from chastisement all the way up to genocide. God unleashes evil kings to do evil. It's a question of their hearts being hardened to do what they want to do anyway. And God's like, You're gonna be my man to destroy these people. This evil that's going to befall this entire race, you're the guy that's gonna do it. Because you're gonna do it anyway, I'm gonna permit it. I'm gonna let you be the king that goes and wipes out this neighbor because the neighbor is the one that I'm punishing. So when you have a situation like the USSR or very many others, where there's absolute evil from top to bottom. It is simultaneously the case that we have a duty to end

1:27:19 that evil by whatever station we are, and that God has permitted it. But God hasn't permitted it to the extent that well, it's okay. You know, God let Stalin be in charge of the USSR, so that means it's fine when he doesn't. No. That means that they were under chastisement as well, as well as the rest of the world. Russia was destroyed by the Soviet rule. That country was absolutely destroyed. It will never recover. They were a mess beforehand, which is why they fell under chastisement. It's ugly when God unleashes evil rulers. And you know, again, that's over our pay grade as individuals to have those battles, but it's important to recognize that these things happen in the timeline and we see examples in scripture, we see examples

1:28:03 in modern history and everywhere in between. The Pope was permitted to be the Pope by God. As we've said in the past, some of the popes were good. You know, there were men who were absolutely good Christian leaders, even failing the fact that we disagree with the office itself existing. There were periods when the Roman Catholic Church was behaving as a good Christian church. It was the only one we had in the West. It was a territorial monopoly. So we're thankful that that Christianity was preserved. But the bad popes were permitted by God too. And they're permitted for the chastisement both of the church and of the countries that tolerated it. And that was part of what the battle that played out, beginning

1:28:42 in Germany and the Reformation, when Christians began to resist what at that time had become the clear-cut tyranny of the Roman pontiff, suddenly a lot more men got involved in these questions. And it was a terrible situation. We talked about that in the Reformation episode. It was terrible for this situation to have ever been created in the first place. The Reformation was not desirable, but it was necessary. And at the very beginning, their only desire was to run Was to reform the church. There was no overthrow. It was never anarchy. It was never rebellion. Their goal was to say, hey, we believe scripture says one thing, and the current Pope and the recent popes are doing something different.

1:29:24 Let's Let's get back to what we were doing in the past, an argument that they made from history, and what we believe scripture teaches. And that's when the killing began. That's when the Pope doubled down. And we see that same malice today in modern church bodies, where when there is resistance from the rank and file or from the lesser magistrates of pastors or priests or anyone at some mid level saying, hey, this theology is bad, they immediately get targeted for destruction. And it's coming swiftly and frequently today. It's the same spirit. You're going to see this play out over and over again. And so one of the tremendous values of the Magdikberg Confession is the general framework. As I said at the beginning, it's not strictly about matters of

1:30:08 conscience or it's specifically about matters of doctrine. In that case it applies, and that's a very important question. But I don't know if we'll ever see another government that's directly tied where the belief of the leader is reflected in the belief of the country. I think that would be a good and desirable thing. And obviously it's most desirable if it's the correct doctrine. But even failing that, the doctrine of the lesser magistrate still applies. In secular contexts, when absolute evil is occurring, you know, resistance to Stalin, well he did have something to do because he exterminated the Christian church. He exterminated Christianity in Russia. That was resistance against evil for the sake of the church, but

1:30:50 it was resist even absent that he could have left Christianity itself alone completely. All the other destruction that was being done was absolutely evil and had to be resisted. So the framework is generally applicable, and that's why we're talking about it. It's not just some narrow niche thing and it's a really valuable framework for you to consider. We'll put a link in the show notes where you can get a hold of a copy of it. You can read about it elsewhere. The idea that we have to even deal with these things is only ever going to be a symptom of sin and harm. These pastors who were besieged in their city five hundred years ago should have never had to write about this or think about this

1:31:30 stuff. They were nobodies. And later on when it came up and others pointed back to them, arguments were made, hey, this is a pretty good argument, and guys looked at the list of names like those guys are nobodies. And the answer is yeah, they were. They were forced to do this by circumstance. That's often how theology comes about. The creeds were forced by circumstance. The creeds were written from scripture through reason by the church specifically to battle heresies, rampant heresies and to defend the faith. When the fight is picked, you have these markers that are then left in the history of the Christian church. And the Mogdeburg Confession is an important one for us today, simply because if we don't think about these matters now, how do I

1:32:14 remain a Christian in the face of implacable evil? We will get into trouble. And it's not that these guys have absolute authority, it's an argument. You don't need permission from the Mogdeburg pastors to believe this. They happen to be the first ones to tackle it. They wrote it down, they laid it out. It's a benefit to us to consider it. I'm glad the people have been looking back at this for some time. You know, that I'm sure many of you at this point have heard the doctrine, the lesser magistrate. This origin was born out of evil, out of the extermination of Christians by a wicked pope. Whether any one of them were good, this guy was a bad one. And he did harm. He killed Christians. There are other cases in modern society, certainly in I think in

1:32:58 the rest of the century, we will see Western governments that these tests will prove failed. And if and when the circumstances arrive that we determine, and those in the future determine that some current government is absolutely evil, that it fails those tests that have held up to reason and to scripture, then the next step is not anarchy. The next step is not rebellion. The next step is you find the guy who should be resisting and you help and encourage him and make sure that the resistance is godly. As individuals, all we can do is try to bring a Christian voice to these difficult problems. These are all ultimately matters of wisdom, which is why there's no playbook, there's no carbon copying from one portion of history into another

1:33:42 and saying we got to do it exactly like this. We're never going to see cities besieged by a papal army to force some city to stop being Lutheran. It's not gonna happen. So if that's all you think that the confession is about, then it's completely worthless. It's a dead letter and there's no point. If there's some wisdom contained in it, even if you even if you're a Roman Catholic. That's why I said you can disregard the polemics and the historical circumstances and still apply the wisdom of their arguments from scripture to situations that face all of us today. It's part of the reason that it's useful to look at history only insofar as you're going to root around and find the stuff that's good and throw away the rest.

1:34:21 You can't just carbon cop, you can't clone one guy's philosophy from one century directly into another. I think that the arguments they make are good and they're sound, they're scriptural, they're useful, but the application is always going to be a matter of wisdom. And that's why we have to think about these things and talk about them, particularly in times where it's not pressing. You don't want to have to figure this stuff out when they're about to lay siege to you for whatever reason, by whatever means. You want to figure this stuff out when it's quiet so you can be prepared. God willing, this will only ever be an incidental matter for us. If we thought that were the case, we wouldn't be doing the

1:35:00 episode. But it's relevant. It's something just to have in your back pocket to understand the thinking and to be prepared. If you disagree with their arguments, that's fine. Come up with a better framework. They provide a four pronged test and three prongs. Maybe you need five and two, doesn't matter. The structure is just there for your benefit to start thinking. We need to do more of that as Christians. We need to think like Christians and act like Christians, and then we will conduct our lives like Christians. But we cannot continue to engage in the bumper sticker theology where we're basically just governed by school marms and everything is tolerate evil, don't get mad. You can't be angry about that, you got to put up with

1:35:40 it. Jesus wanted you to do that. That politics, that religion lost at the ballot box, and it lost at the cross. Jesus did not die on the cross for us to be weak and to be destroyed. We were given tasks in this life to honor God. And as men and his leaders, that specifically includes protecting the weaker, protecting those who cannot protect themselves. Any man who's in a position of authority has a duty to God, and if that means he has to go against the man above him, that's a terrible duty. But nevertheless, it's one that remains