Legitimating Leviathan
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

There was a time when radicals and revolutionaries were called heroes. We revere our founding fathers because of their courage in facing up to the tyranny of England. Those who signed their names to the Declaration of Independence were nearly signing their own death warrants. Eighty-five years later some men sought to throw off the tyranny of the state and for that they have been systematically vilified. To wave the battleflag of those who fought the second American War of Independence is tantamount to committing a hate crime.

History is indeed written by the victors. Such a fact muddies the water as one seeks to understand what is legitimate government. Even the term 'legitimate" is confusing as it relates to the state. On the one hand we may be referring to orderly transfers of power. A legitimate government in this sense is one which can claim power as an inheritance from some previous legitimate government. On the other hand a legitimate government in this first sense can behave very illegitimately in the latter sense. They can exceed their calling, abscond with funds, pillage and plunder. In fact the government formed out of the Revolution, the Articles of Confederation, and the government which came about through a bloodless coup, the Constitutional government, and the government of The Confederate States of America were all three illegitimate in the sense that the governments which preceded them did not voluntarily hand over power, but each was an improvement on its predecessor in terms of behaving legitimately.

How one moves from a legitimately formed government to a legitimately acting government is a great puzzle. Some would say in our current state that one can't get there from here. Ours is a state which is illegitimate on both ways. The Articles came through war, Yankee rule through a coup, and rule over the south through a war of conquest. And of course the state behaves illegitimately as a matter of course, consuming over a third of the wealth of the citizens, brazenly disregarding its supreme law, waging war around the globe, and controlling our lives as the great totalitarian nanny. Our state has so far overstepped its bounds that few even recognize what governments exist for.

What would the ideal government look like? Two old, but important books help us to understand. Frederic Bastiate's The Law, and Samuel Rutherford's Lex Rex both make the point that legitimate law is a rule of law rather than a rule of men. They argue that the state must be bound by a law transcendent over its own actions. That is, the ultimate check on rapacious government is not stronger men or bigger guns, which then become the true state and need to be watched, but an unchanging law. Men change, men are corrupted, men are susceptible to the thirst for power. Law doesn't change, isn't corruptible, and knows no desire for power.

But whence comes this law? In order to avoid the plague of the rule of men, the source of law must be beyond men. The ideal of democracy grounds law in the will of the people, and ushers in the tyranny of the majority. A better choice is a constitutional monarchy grounded in God's revealed law. Whether that law is the law Scripture says is revealed in nature, or an attempt to translate Old Testament civil law for our times is an internal debate among friends. I prefer the former, most of my friends the latter. Either way it is God's law. Either way the ministry of the state is severely limited. The state would exist to punish evildoers (the former understanding of law would see these "evildoers" essentially as those who steal and murder, the latter would include adulterers, homosexuals, blasphemers etc.). They wouldn't even enter our lives unless or until we commit an evil, or have one committed against us. The ideal state carries a sword, not a test tube like the DEA and FDA, not a ruler like the department of education, not cheese and peanut bufter like AFDC, not mortgage papers like FMA, and no checks like the boatload of alphabet soup departments that ought all be called the DBV, the department of buying votes. The ideal state should be like children, small, seen, but rarely heard.