Baby is healthy. Parents are tired. All kinds of good and tired and fun and crazy. Not much cool stuff to report yet. He basically just eats, sleeps, poops.

Today I wanted to talk about church politics. This is going to be a long blog, and hard for me to post, because we always want something which is more grand by our own standards. I have to conform myself to scripture and reason as I see it, though, and so this post represents a small shift in my immediate kingdom/empire-related goals.

Sometimes, when I think about the government and its departure from God's laws, I really want to do something about it! And, what better way to effect change in the government than by getting involved, and eventually running for some kind of office? My views could potentially be called "conservative". Given the ease with which a person can market themselves on the internet with a small budget, I think it's not a far stretch of the imagination to suppose that I could run a successful race for some small government office, and then slowly work my way up the ladder to more influence as I gain experience. I don't see this as a statement to the effect of my own qualifications or anything -- I think anyone can run for office these days, if they play their cards right and have relatable ideas (and let's be clear, I know exactly zero people who totally relate to my ideas). I mean, look how far some other politicians have made it. Sometimes the idea seems really desirable to me, because government office seems like an ideal place from which a person can make changes for good. Certainly I want to do good.

Here's the thing... even though part of me really likes the idea, I don't think I could ever actually do it. I've talked at length in previous blogs about how the Bible doesn't contain any command to compromise with an unjust government. God's commands represent an absolute standard of justice and morality, so any concession is unjust and/or immoral. In order for me to take office, even though my goal might be to change the system, I would have to abide by and uphold the system to some degree. I don't think I could do that. For example, just by voting against a change to law, I'm participating in the legislative process, which I think shouldn't exist. There are two common passages that I've heard, which people often bring up in favor of submission to human government systems. I've written a lot about the first one, (Romans 13) so I'll quickly respond to it in the next short paragraph. The meat of this blog is going to be [Part 1] about Mark 12:17, and, if I get to it in this post, [Part 2] about my ideas about what Christians should do in response to a secular government (a little development from last time I articulated this topic).

Alright, so first off, Romans 13. It says that we should submit to governing authorities. Then it defines "governing authorities" as authorities which use their God-given influence to punish evil and promote good. So, if an entity claims to be a governing authority, but does not punish evil and promote good, then it is not what Romans 13 is talking about; the command to submit does not apply.

--Part 1--

But Mark 12:17 gives an important balance to the above statements about authority. Take Rome, for example, since it's what they were talking about in that immediate context. Rome was a pagan kingdom, operating in direct and unrepentant violation of several of God's commands for government. Rome levied taxes in Roman currency on people who lived in Roman territories. Should Israel pay taxes to Rome? Jesus answers by pointing out that Caesar's face is on the Roman coin, and saying "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and give to God what is God's". Let's dig into that response a bit.

First of all, in order for Jesus to have said that without contradicting all the laws of God simultaneously, he must NOT have meant, "obey Caesar even when Caesar commands you to disobey God". The behavior of the apostles in Acts 5:29 supports my interpretation here.

Also, the statement is definitely more complicated than "obey the law of the land wherever it doesn't disagree with God's law". Jesus is issuing an imperative here, relating to taxes, where compulsory/forceful taxation is not an activity which God's law delegates to human governments -- the taxation itself was sinful inasmuch as it was being [reason 1]forced by an [reason 2]illegitimate governing authority (see above comments on Romans 13). Again, the Bible includes no civil penalty for failure to pay taxes -- the tithe is a moral/ceremonial law, enforced only by God.

So then what does the statement by Jesus mean? What's the application? Well, let's try taking it at "face" value and see where that gets us (hehe). We know that God owns literally everything. But more specifically, in the context of the Israel economy, God claims Israel's first-fruits. So, giving to God what is Gods can be read as a reminder to give our first-fruits to God. Lots of ink has been spilled by other people in effort to explain "first-fruits", so I'm going to focus on the other part of the statement here: Jesus indicates that Roman Currency is the property of Caesar, and so whatever part of it is recalled to Caesar (taxes) should be given back to Caesar. Caesar has the right to require that we give to him what is his.

Let's apply it. This affects how we view money and property in general. The U.S. Dollar has George Washington's face on it. It belongs to him (and let's not be obtuse -- this clearly means that the dollar belongs to the U.S. Government, which itself is represented by the president).

That means that every dollar in my possession is actually owned by the U.S. Government. What do we call it when we posses something which belongs to another person? It's either theft or a loan. Every dollar is a loan, borrowed from the government, for the amount of its own value. And good old Generous George tells us, "if you work hard, I'll give you more dollars, and let you go into even more debt to me!".

But people go crazy for that debt. They will give up literally anything they have for it - their time, their land, their clothes, etc.. It's so deeply ingrained in our society that you can't get anything without it! The only way to get food in the U.S. is to trade for it in debt-notes. And, if you want to own something big, like a plot of land, then you have to go into debt for debt and then work for more debt to pay off your debt debt.

OK, what am I advocating here? What's the point?  Should we switch to a barter economy? No, actually. If you work it out, all economies eventually come to rely on currency. For example, suppose a cow farmer wants to buy his neighbor's land to put more cows on it. without currency, the cow farmer can only pay with what he has: cows. His neighbor exchanges the land for 100 cows. Now the neighbor has less land and more need for land, to support his new cows -- it won't work for him. Instead, he trades for a promissory note, guaranteeing that he can have the meat from 100 cows, cared for by the cow farmer. Now the holder of the note wants to hire someone to build him a nicer house on his remaining land; he finds someone willing to do it, but he doesn't have anything worth the whole upgrade that he wants to perform... except that note worth 100 cows. The construction worker says that the value of the work is equivalent to the value of the meat from 50 cows. The owner of the 100 cow promissory note divides his note into two 50 cow promissory notes, and a currency is born, bound initially to the value of a cow, but eventually as the trade network becomes more complex, the original binding evaluation of the cow-note can be forgotten. Eventually, the people in this hypothetical place are just trading in arbitrarily-named "bucks". Even if it remains ultimately bound to the cow-standard, the buck, in its use, seems to have very little to do with cows anymore, and anyway it's hard for that farmer to keep track of who has legitimate cow-notes. So the people step in with a government. They put some jerk's face on every buck, and say, 'everyone trading in bucks must trade in our standardized bucks. And in order to keep the press running, everyone has to contribute 1 buck for every 100 bucks gained.'

I know it's much more complicated than that. My point is: currency is inevitable.

So then, do Christians in the U.S. establish their own currency and stop trading in Dollars? Impossible. The American people have all given their land over to the American government by agreeing to pay property taxes. If you don't pay your taxes, the government comes and takes the land from you, and there is no "army of free Americans" to rescue you and your land from from Generous George. As long as you live in America, you have to use the dollar. It's not much different in other places. The world seems to have been basically divided into various lands, owned by governments, and afaik all of them have unjust tax laws inhibiting deviation from their established economies.

So, give to George Washington that which belongs to George Washington. That means, if your government says they get a tax on everything sold with their currency, in their territory, and if you intend to buy and sell with their currency, in their territory, then you should pay that tax. And, in general, give to other people what belongs to them.

--Part 2--

But there's a silver lining here. I want to preface it by saying that I'm trying to reach these conclusions by meditation on God's law, and I want to avoid fitting it into a mold advocated by modern political philosophers, (for example, I personally know some people who say about God's law, "this seems like socialism", and then they go study socialism to understand God's law, rather than studying God's law to understand God's law).

OK, so let's take God's government in its purest form, prior to the human monarchy. Granted, the Israelites made a huge mess of things in Judges. I think it's because, as it says in the prophets, God had written his commandments on tablets of stone, but he had not yet written them on the hearts of the Israelites (writing the law on their hearts is something he would do in the new covenant). We know that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit serves to inscribe the law of God on our hearts (sanctification). I propose that the Holy Spirit and the ready accessibility of God's Word empowers us to make better use of God's Law in establishing an actual government.

What do we see in God's government? How is it composed?

God raised up Moses to be Judge over Israel, and promised to later raise up others to be judges, prophets, nazirites, etc.. The priest of Midian advised Moses to choose judges from among the people: a judge over 10, a judge over 100, another over 1000, 10000, and so on, in orders of 10. This system worked when the judges made their rulings according to God's law, and it was blessed by God. Strictly speaking, these judges only existed to help solve issues among the people according to the Law of God, about which the people were supposed to be well instructed anyway. The judges were not given authority to levy taxes, establish any standing army, or enact any compulsory social welfare programs. For all intents and purposes, this was not a government at all in the modern sense.

That's the silver lining. The Christian government can exist in certain forms anywhere. This is where this post is a little different from prior posts, where I talked about Christians separating from the U.S. government entirely and establishing a Biblical state somewhere. I still advocate that as an eventual goal -- a Christian state -- but since it has to be achieved peacefully, I suspect that it will come about very slowly, and that it will be the Zeal of the Lord of Hosts who accomplishes it; not my zeal. So, there's room for discussion about how we should act in the interim. How can Christians act as functionaries in a secular government prior to completely separating themselves from it?

I here propose that Christians adopt a type of judicial isolation from the U.S. government. In the absence of a "Moses", every 10 Christians identifies from among themselves a respected elder, knowledgeable in Scripture. The precedent for this is readily available in the OT law, where it often talks about "bringing [the accused] to the elders", etc, in a way that appears interchangeable with bringing someone "to the judge". The elders in a town were respected members of the community who were entrusted by the people to make discernments about matters pertaining to God's law and their community. Their power was derived from God's system, and really only existed inasmuch as it was acknowledged by their constituents (see Lex Rex again).

Before we get too carried away with thinking that this seems to be approaching the American judicial structure, remember that these elected judges are the entire government, and they are effective toward groups of only 10 people per judge. So every 10 people in the Church should identify among themselves one who they respect, and utilize that person as judge to resolve disputes. The higher judges do not establish precedent with their rulings (the way American higher judges do) -- judgments should be made only by considering scripture and the circumstances at hand. Higher judges cannot take initiative to overrule lower judges. Higher judges only work when they are called upon by lower judges or their constituents, when the matter is too hard for the lower judge to resolve, or when the people find that the lower judge is not acting Biblically. Since the authority of the lower judge is rooted only in the scripture, if the people find that a judge's ruling is incompatible with scripture, they may overrule it, like a jury of the person's peers. The judge is not the ultimate authority in any case; the scripture is. There are no career judges, because there are no taxes to pay them. That's why it's important to have so many judges with such a small constituency, so that their small workload enables them to continue with their other practical responsibilities. And lastly, there's no legislative process affecting any change on the way that these judges should measure a case -- only scripture.

Without diving deep into the scriptural basis for the above, since most of it is not based on any individual scripture but on an analysis of the typical "way things seem to have happened" in Biblical society when things were described as pleasing to God, I think that the above is basically in-line with scripture. I'll admit that it's difficult for me to identify whether any part of this is too heavily influenced by my cultural biases; I would love it if someone would use scripture to explain to me where I'm wrong.

The NT instruction to believers under a pagan government was that Christians should never file lawsuits against one another in court (1 Cor 1:6-8). Instead of that, the Biblical steps for resolving conflict are: 1. Confront in private; 2. Bring it to the elders; 3. Bring it before the church body; and 4. Church discipline. (Mat 18:15-21). Notice that step 2 is "the elders"! I want to suggest that this is the interim government, in place over Christians only, while we wait for opportunity to peacefully establish our own government (at which time, the elders become the judicial government, and execution of civil law takes a different form). Remember that Paul clearly tells us in 2 Cor 10, the weapons of our warfare to conquer for God's kingdom are arguments and scripture. God promised land to Abraham in the OT and told them to conquer it with the sword, but the land which he promised to Christians in the new covenant is the whole world, and it is said to be conquered via the "weapons of our warfare", which again he says are arguments and scripture. Basically, we gain this land by converting everyone to Christianity.

So let me close this out with a description of Church discipline, just to paint a more complete picture. As far as I can tell, from the descriptions of Church discipline in the NT, it is a unique form of justice, different from civil execution of OT penal sanctions. Remember, this post is not about establishing the Christian State - this is about separating the Christian judicial system while still living inside a secular state. Church discipline is described in the NT in two ways (off the top of my head). First, "treat them as you would a pagan or tax collector" (Mat 18:17), which basically means that an unrepentant sinner is no longer to be considered part of the body, and the victim (and everyone else) should limit association with that person in order to avoid further harm. The person is thereafter a target for ministry, rather than a trusted family member. Second, "turn them  over to the devil for the destruction of the flesh" (1 Cor 5:5), which I understand to mean basically the same thing as Matthew 18:17 says. The person who knowingly continues in sin without repentance, even after having been confronted, is not a child of God, and is therefore given back to his true master until he repents. This doesn't mean that any member of the church actually causes physical harm to the perpetrator, but rather that they spiritually give him over -- he's not a member of the church anymore. He can continue attending church; it doesn't say that we shun or banish the person. The penalty is entirely spiritual with respect to the rest of the church, but we know that the devil can affect the physical world when given permission (Job). Church discipline in the case of a person who evidences himself to be unrepentant is this: we just call it what it is, and let God and the devil sort out the rest.

Conclusion: basically, there are a lot of churches in the States which, in practice, have the right idea already. I guess that for the meantime, the church as a whole just needs to get more organized.

"Now from his pocket quick he flashes the crayon, on the wall he slashes, deep upon the advertising, a single worded poem comprised of four letters."