Well, I’m not sure that I’m going to persuade many of you, accept that I think where we differ is largely in our interpretation, not of scripture but of context. Secondly, I’m a public servant, and have worked in regulatory government for over a dozen years. So I’ve given thought to the subject of regulation and my faith, a little more than most.
I’ve always sought to avoid over-simplifying Romans 13, especially when it could be so self-serving to the one in authority. Let’s not forget, Christ also commanded the tax collector to do what was right and to not take more than what was owed. What a problematic command, especially since tax collectors in that day were not on a government salary but lived off the excess of what they could collect.
America is said to be a nation of laws, not of men. Challenging, an authority under that law is not necessarily rebellion. If in doing my job, and I stray outside of the authority given to me by law, those over whom I’m given authority may appeal to a higher authority on the basis of the law, not on the basis of whether or not I actually have the authority to do my job. I expect those under my authority to be professional and respectful but I don’t begrudge them the right to seek a different decision from my higher up. That’s not rebellion necessarily, though it can be when dishonest methods are used to achieve their desired ends.
Alternatively, I’ve also seen instances where higher ups at one time or another decided to disallow something for which they had no legal standing to prohibit. Why? Because their authority was enumerated but they were acting as though it wasn’t. When those overreaches were brought to the attention of new higher up, they had to decide whether the allow the precedent to stand in spite of the overreach or to change policy.
At the national level numerous stumbling blocks have been raised over the last 200 years by rebellious men, who hated the law under which they were to served. In their rebellion we now live in a nation where all law is interpreted or even new law written through the lense of controversy. In fact, (sarcasm warning) the third legislative branch of our government (i.e. the Supreme Court) has decided that it will only hear cases of controversy. Case in point, no national law was ever passed permitting the abomination of abortion, but it was dictated by judicial fiat and utter rebellion. It was rebellion in multiple ways, first because it sought to overturn laws that already regarded murder of the unborn as murder, secondly, it was rebellion against God and his authority to say what is evil.
This is why its impossible to correct this particular evil legislatively. Abortion will have to be rectified judicially. Which means that our present rebellion must be confronted with the law. So this raises the question as to the methods of those confronting this immoral act. Is the man merely refusing to pay taxes, or is he willing to pay them in so far as the national government not violate its own laws.
For the sake of this discussion I’ll avoid the question of the constitutionality of federal income taxes, or even of the constitutionality of the federal government to regulate anything but interstate commerce, as those matter may be in rebellion of the constitution but not necessarily in rebellion of God’s moral law. But I will say that using the imperative discussed already, we can clearly say that such rebellion against the constitution is also rebellion against God, whether or not the controversy is one of such moral clarity.
But since we do have constitution rights enumerated separately from the powers granted to our governing authorities, we must ask if there is legitimate contraversy caused by constitutional rebellion, for which this man might have standing. Frankly I’m not going to try to judge all of those elements of his contraversy, and those who do will only render a decision of the basis of their majority opinion.
There is not much else that I despise as morality by consensus. In either case, if he is able to prove that the act of taking taxes from Christians and giving them to other competing religious authorities for the sake of their rituals, is a violation of the Constitution, which prohibits the establishment of a religion, well I’m ok with that.
Again, I don’t fully know his motives, and don’t really care to examine his every method of bringing the contraversy to light, as I am not going to be the one to judge him. He might win and he might loose, but that won’t be how we know that it was rebelion or if he was living like a faithful Israelite in Babylonian captivity.