Fear God, Honor The Emperor Statement by Evangelicals and Christians Together

In the November issue of First Things Magazine, Evangelicals and Catholics Together, an ecumenical movement for political and social change founded in 1994 by the cosigners Charles Colson and Richard John Neuhaus, has released a statement. Titled 'Fear God, Honor the Emperor,' it represents a fairly robust primer on Christian political philosophy in the 21st century takes shape and is laid out accordingly. In this episode, I want to read through the statement and provide some running commentary on its claims and insights. As well as providing a briefer summary of its highlights, as I see them. First, a denial of both nature and God's authority endangers us all. Godlessness is leading us to tyranny. If God has called us to more, the Zeitgeist will not hear of it, preferring repressive and intractable separations based on race, gender, and sexual orientation for their political utility. If this is all there is, it is totalitarianism. And yet our long, rich tradition as Christians must lead us to pursue and embrace both civil and ecclesiological reformations.  We now inhabit a society which stubbornly denies God’s call to place our faith in Him. Thus, in rejecting God's authority, we also see the unraveling of the basis for human authority. Christians cannot go along with this, neither can we legitimately recognize any human authority as absolute because all human authority is dependent on God’s authority, which moderates and provides a check on it.  That is also to say, by way of reminder, that Jesus is Lord in the present-tense, and not only in the past or in the kingdom come. Thus we reject the de facto godlessness which says civil authority is a merely human convention and agreement, moderated only by its imagination and will. What we do, and must, support, respect, and honor in human authority is the prohibition and curbing of evil by the civil magistrate. And yet governments throughout history have rebelled against God’s law. And when they have turned against morality and justice, Christians not only have practiced civil disobedience, they have also worked to replace those governments with others which use their power properly, and to which Christians can be loyal without disobeying God. We cannot ignore, then, the ­wrongs and falsehoods which are to be found in every human governmental system in this fallen world, including our own. Rather, we work to reform these, even as we recognize that the truest and deepest peace which may result, by God's grace, is only found in honoring and worshipping God as His people. There are indeed limits on what can be accomplished politically. For instance, our political, economic, and social structures presuppose fallen, sinful humanity acting out of ambition, greed, and self-interest. Yet it is a mistake that too many Christians react to the limitations on the peace which is attainable in the earthly city by denying it has any value whatsoever so long as it fails to measure up to the ideals achievable only in the City of God.  A refusal to content ourselves with the boundaries of what peace can be had here on Earth may even be an ungodly discontentedness with God not having yet brought about the replacement of this Heavens and Earth with the New Creation by those who say they are conservative. Meanwhile, we do well to note that the greatest atrocities in the modern era were carried out by men and women who were intent on realizing something like this hope independently, on their own power, in their own timing, and in their own way. Thus we see a pair of errors sent into the world representing our impatience and discontentedness: both Activism and Inactivism. God's servant must reject both alike, and for the same reason, that neither is obedience or a faithful witness to God's goodness and grace.