If You Can Keep It
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

Don't know if it's true, or if it's the first instance of an urban legend in U.S. history, but the story goes like this. Ben Franklin has just left the closing of the Constitutional convention. He meets a woman outside the hall who asks, "Mr. Franklin, what kind of government have you given us?" Franklin replied, "A republic, if you can keep it." How very prescient of the old man.

Most of us don't even know what a republic is anymore. As kids we all pledged our allegiance to the flag, and to the republic for which it stands. And then we cheered on our troops sent about the world in an effort to "make the world safe for democracy." Whether we pledge to a republic or fight for democracy we are not pledging or fighting about political parties. Both Republicans and Democrats are democrats. There's not a soul in Washington committed to the republic that we pledged allegiance to.

Democracy is made up of two words. Demo is rooted in the word for people, cracy in the word for rule. It is a system of government whereby the will of the majority becomes law. Such is a reprehensible abomination, a heresy the founding father's found repugnant, and a gross affront against God. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what is for lunch. And therein lies the problem. We oppose democracy as a legal system because it is in practice mobocracy. That 70 or 80 percent of the people think Mr. Clinton is a sweetheart of a guy (they don't, but even if they did) that does not change the law.

And law is at the heart of what a real republic is. A republic is a system of government wherein law is law. It is a system where we have, as Frederic Bastiat described in his work The Law, a rule of law rather than a rule of men. Samuel Rutherford made the same case from biblical grounds in his great work Lex Rex, Latin for The Law is King. During the height of European monarchy, when the notion of a "divine right of kings" was held, the idea was Rex Lex, the king is law.

It is because of this commitment to the law being the highest ruler in the land that all of our federal officers, including those serving in the military, swear an oath not the protect and defend the people of these United States, but to protect and defend the Constitution. And it is precisely because none keep this oath that we do not have a republic. When an election is said to determine the outcome of a trial, then we have a rule of men.

Which raises the obvious question. If we are to have a rule of law, then whose law is it? Former Chief justice Oliver Wendell Holmes gloried in this problem when he declared, "The Constitution is what nine old men say it is." But the question makes a deadly assumption. It assumes that all law is rooted in men, and since men disagree, we have to go with the majority. It is a question that operates from a perspective that is "under the sun."

The law then is not what nine old men say it is, rather it is what the Ancient of Days says it is. There we have the transcendent source of law. We have law because He who lives beyond the sun has come and spoken His law to us. The law of God is what tells us what the law of man is. Now the only question left is what the law of God is. Now we are left with an internal debate between my theonomist friends and we happy few who actually believe that God reveals natural law. But we agree that God's law is the law, and the will of the people is of no consequence.

As much as I revere the Constitution, I have to recognize that it misses this. We who are conservative are always harping about the separation of powers, both among different levels of government, and among the different branches of government. The republic was doomed not when the founders created an unelected judicial branch that would arrogate to itself the power to make law, nor when it created the executive branch with an army behind it. The problem is the legislature. If a government operates under the rule of law, what need is there for new laws? Has God not given us enough laws? God established a system of courts. But He established no legislature. He was the legislature. And by the way, He still is.

Leviathan is the monster that it is because with each new law, whether created democratically or tyrannically, it oversteps its bounds. The fearful size of leviathan is revealed not only in budgets exceeding by the hundreds of billions a trillion dollars, but in the number of pages in the federal registry, that burdensome document that lists the laws and regulations of the land.

Our calling then is to call the lawmakers back to the law, to require that they first keep their oaths by defending the Constitution not only from those who would disobey it, but from those who would bury it under a mountain of law. And second we must show them the law of God. He alone has the authority to make law, for He alone is the Lawgiver. We are His, and we are under His sovereign authority. And so are those called to be His ministers of justice. They violate His law by placing on us the yoke of their own law, even if the people ask for it. Democratic tyranny is still tyranny. His burden, on the other hand, is light. But more importantly, it is complete, just, and immutable.