SUMMARY
After reading what I have written, someone may object, saying that I am disparaging all power. Let him not think so – unless he wants it so. I am not holding it in disrespect but I give it the honor due. I say it is good as long as God can work through it. But I do not approve of the things that evil people do with power. I accept authority as long as it is baptized – that is the way I like to call it.
Secular authority is necessary for the governance of temporal things, useful to the world, holding it together; the world would fall apart without it. I say this using human logic, so to speak.
However, since God is the Lord of the world, capable of governing it even without this human authority, and since we presume that it is His pleasure to have the world managed through authority – that is, through rulers as his officials as it were – therefore those who hold power over this world have the obligation to rule it justly for the greatest good of all.
But can it be said about Christians that they are more honest, more disciplined through faith, and more patient than the world? By no means. Facts witness to the reality that they have abandoned God, that they have entered the world and become one with the world. Whatever the world considers praiseworthy – vanity, comfort, wealth, fancy notions, blasphemies – the Christians, too, praise with one accord, quite blatantly without shame and without conscience. We can find with difficulty one man in a thousand who does not conform himself to the world. For this reason authority is necessary for the pagan world, since a man of weak faith will not be better than a pagan. A world contrary to God must be kept within bounds by the world’s sword.
But true Christians love God and their neighbors as themselves; they commit no evil by the grace of God. It is not necessary to compel them to goodness since they know better what is good than the law-imposing authority. They have a knowledge of God within, which is a knowledge of His commandments and His love. Having His love within they do good to others and are just to all men in accordance with His law so that the authorities which rule the world have no occasion to find them guilty.
When faith and love die in men – the two qualities that can perform miracles – they are left in such corruption that secular sovereignty is hardly in the position to restrain them.
God has given us faith for the purpose of doing good deeds, pleasing to Him and useful to the entire world. When men fall away from faith they are seized with the passions of this world and immediately the sword directs their ways.
The sword does not always reach the transgression[529] but the ruler all of a sudden sends a bandit with a sword; he comes from somewhere, unexpected, and proceeds to pilfer, to plunder, to arrest, to imprison, and to murder, until in the end God leaves no one unpunished by the revengeful sword.
But all this secular authority has derived its power from a false interpretation of the Scriptures; it is an interpretation espoused by the Antichrist and all his power works against Christ and his chosen ones through the medium of the secular power.
