Douglas Wilson is hard at work making the case for the
right to free speech from a Christian foundation, and I give him full credit
for grappling with the abstract with all the enthusiasm of Don Quixote tilting
at windmills.
But in explaining his position, Doug is making an undefended
assumption — or at very least one he does not attempt to defend in this
particular post — which may sound perfectly reasonable to many Christians:
that biblical law ought to serve as a foundation or framework for modern
society.
Postmillennial Posting
That assumption comes out of Doug’s postmillennial view of prophetic
scripture, which takes some of the final words of Christ to his followers to
mean we have an obligation not only to take the gospel to individuals, but also to use the principles of the word of God (which in practice means the Law of
Moses) to transform the cultures of entire nations and bring them into
submission to Christ.
I’m not putting words in Doug’s mouth. In fact, I’m nicking
them directly from his post:
“What does it mean for us who say that we want biblical law to serve as a foundation or framework for modern society?”
There you go. And he goes on to tell us. That’s a rather
large mission, and one for which I feel remarkably unqualified. Sharing
the gospel is one thing; strategically and intentionally transforming entire
nations is quite another.
My own understanding of the commission of Matthew 28:18-20
is that the Lord intended his followers to make disciples from all nations, which is to say that he didn’t want Jewish prejudices
or questions of convenience and preference to govern where the gospel was taken,
but intended that the message of salvation be extended to all. In every nation
of the world, some would hear and obey it and some would hear and would not;
and the ones who obeyed it and submitted to Christ were to be baptized and
taught to observe everything Jesus had commanded them. That understanding is based not on a technical examination of the Greek, which can be read either way, but on reading for myself what Paul and other apostles did throughout the book of Acts, which was precisely what I just described. If in doing so they believed the work of spreading the gospel and making disciples was only the first baby-step in the process of nation transformation, they certainly neglected to inform us of this elsewhere in the New Testament.
Gradual Transformation vs. the Rod of Iron
The idea of bringing the
nations themselves to heel — rewriting their legal documentation, eradicating
their bureaucratic corruption, and entirely transforming centuries of ingrained
social practices to bring them into line with Christian principles — is
intriguing, I’ll admit. It has certainly been tried. Indeed, the Christian’s function-by-design
as salt
and light
in the world almost demands a measure of naturally-transformative social
influence, something which has demonstrably occurred over the centuries. Immanuel Can points this out in his Thursday post this week, and Doug Wilson would surely find it
encouraging.
Nevertheless, it is my conviction that meaningful, lasting social, cultural,
legal and bureaucratic transformation on a worldwide scale await not the
working-through of the gospel into the societies and systems of the nations of world, but rather the coming of Christ himself to rule
these nations with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter’s
vessel, something that would be quite unnecessary in the event that the nations
had already been transformed through the agency of the gospel. As much as Christians
have accomplished in the West over the centuries by applying the principles of
scripture to a lost world, the vast majority of our planet still remains to be similarly
transformed. Moreover, it is increasingly difficult to make the argument that
our Western world is moving in the direction of greater submission to the
gospel. In fact, the opposite is very much the case.
Rights on the Scrap Heap
All to say that when it comes to the question of biblical
law serving as a foundation or framework for modern society, that seems to me a
very nice, eminently desirable and altogether fantastical notion, while Doug
Wilson views it as a mission he (and we) have received directly from Christ
himself. That difference in our understanding of scripture is not trivial;
rather, it is foundational to the way we each think, pray, write and deal with
the world around us.
From where I am coming on the postmillennial
interpretation of Matthew 28:18-20 (that it’s all wet, to put it politely),
a post like Doug’s on the “right” to free speech loses me at the door. After
all, if your foundational assumption is in error, then everything you try to build
upon that foundation may be extremely well-intended, and may involve centuries
of hard labor, but it is all ... well, to put it delicately, destined for
the scrap heap. To speak meaningfully of rights and freedoms involves being
able to speak of methods of enforcing them, otherwise such “rights” are nothing
more than gas.
And how exactly does one enforce the right to free speech in
our present day, when the law is interpreted by cowards and ideologues, when
your vote is stolen by a corrupt bureaucracy, and when the Big Tech barons have
more power than any nation on earth? Good luck with that. The concept of a general entitlement to free speech remains
an airy notion, a conceit rather than a right.
The Apostles and Free Speech
No, there is no such thing as free speech. Certainly the
apostles didn’t have it. What they had was costly
speech. They walked out into the public square with a message almost nobody
in positions of authority wanted to hear and inflicted it on them in spite of
all their efforts to silence it. As a result, they were delivered
over to courts, flogged in the synagogues, dragged before governors and
kings, and even stoned like Stephen by their own neighbors and kin. To the extent that Paul, Peter and the others had “rights” under Roman law to
which they could appeal, sometimes those
rights were respected and other times — by far the
vast majority of the time — they were not.
Free
speech? In the end, most of the apostles were executed because of what they had
to say. Their speech was exceedingly expensive.
With all respect to Doug Wilson, the issue for the Christian
with free speech is not how to rationalize it and demonstrate how logical and
necessary it is for all. Even if that is true, the fact is that we live in a
world that does not stop to ask which lovely package of constitutional “rights”
we are invoking today before happily steamrolling right over them.
A Price to be Paid
So, regardless of the philosophical superstructure that has
historically been erected to support the concept, let’s suppose we have no practical right to free speech. Should
that shut Christians up? I leave it to you to decide, but we have the very
powerful example of the entire New Testament to encourage us to open our mouths
and say whatever the Lord commands us to say to the world regardless of the
personal cost.
We certainly have a very defensible right to costly speech.
It starts with these words, from the very same passage Doug Wilson uses as the
basis for his argument in defense of free speech: “All
authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” Jesus promised
us we have every bit of authority — every right in the world — to speak for him; indeed, we are not
politely invited but obligated to do these things: Go. Baptize. Teach. It is “We must obey God rather than men”, not “We prefer to.”
He just didn’t say we will always get to do it
consequence-free. After all, the Lord’s own speech wasn’t without its
consequences, was it?
For us too there may be a price to be paid. The question is
whether we are prepared to pay it.
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