Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
Lord John Acton (1834-1902) famously wrote, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
We’ve come to accept it as an axiom, an obvious truth no one disputes. (I would make an exception for God here: he has absolute power and is eternally incorruptible. I’m happy to apply Acton’s axiom to all humanity.)
I think his statement is a reasonable summary of Biblical teaching.
I only wish that my fellow Christians believed it. Honestly, though, they don’t. Modern evangelicalism is losing the idea of Original Sin, or Total Depravity. This is the biblical doctrine that says all persons are, by nature, morally fallen as a direct result of the sin of Adam. We don’t hit the ground running as blanks slates, much less “basically good.”
King David, a man after God’s heart, the best king in Israel’s history, confessed his awareness that he was brought forth in sin, even from his mother’s womb. (Psalms 51:5) Similarly, Paul goes to great lengths in Romans 3 to assure us that there is no one who is righteous, at least compared to God, not even one.
How do I know that Christians don’t really believe this? I read their posts on social media. They seem incapable of admitting that their political heroes are actually giant sinners who cannot be trusted farther than they can be thrown. They’re happy to admit that all the folks on the other side, wearing the wrong colored jerseys, are evil incarnate. But not their guy: their guy is a great guy, whose moral failures either constitute “fake news” or are perfectly justifiable.
It works out in other, smaller ways as well. Evangelicals teach their children to respect and obey authority figures, when, as Acton has taught us, those figures should be viewed with greater suspicion.
The Bible does not teach us to give authority figures the benefit of the doubt. It does not ever teach us to blindly obey their commands or automatically respect their office. Rather, we are to be harmless as doves, willing to submit to their authority insofar as they are using that authority in a just manner.
As the great, early theologian Augustine observed, “An unjust law is no law at all.” The word of God is the standard of justice. It’s how we know what’s what.
In fact, this issue of respecting office-holders and power-wielders as if they were not as sinful and untrustworthy as the rest of us, was the point being argued when Lord Acton penned his famous quip. A simple search online will show you that context. It is worth your time.
Another insightful line from that document is this: “There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.” No badge, title, clerical robe or appointed office can turn villains into good men. Quite the opposite.
Of course, we don’t have much hope of really acting in terms of our fallen state in Adam, when it’s become fashionable in Christian pulpits to doubt whether Adam really existed. The abandonment of the highest view of Scripture is the road to tyranny, and many disasters along the way to our chains.
Gordan Runyan is the pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Tucumcari. Contact him at: