A Catechism
Concerning the Christian's Use of Tainted Instruments
in a Fallen World, and the Obligation of Civil Government

Drawn from Holy Scripture, the Standards of the Covenanted Reformation,
and the Reformed Casuistical Tradition

Fifth and revised edition

Q. 1. What are the five positive characteristics of a fully lawful civil government?

A. Drawn from the testimony of Psalm 2 and the uniform witness of the faithful Reformed confessions, they are: first, official acknowledgement of the Triune God of the Bible as the source of all civil authority; second, the Lord Jesus Christ acknowledged as the only Mediator with dominion over all nations and kings; third, the Moral Law of God held as the supreme law of the land; fourth, the one true Christian religion established and maintained as the religion of the nation, with idolatry, heresy, and blasphemy suppressed; and fifth, civil magistrates required by solemn oath to profess and uphold these things. A government not owning all five in its constitution and laws is not a lawful Christian government in the full biblical sense.

Q. 2. Is a government that doth not answer to this description an imperfect but still lawful government?

A. No. A government that is a terror to good works rather than evil, that protecteth and promoteth idolatry, heresy, blasphemy, and the murder of the innocent, is not a partially lawful government — it is simply an unlawful government, exercising what Rutherford rightly calleth “a sinful and usurped power” in those acts by which it overturns the Law of God. It holdeth power by God’s permissive providence, even as God permitted Pharaoh and Nero; but permissive providence is not divine approbation. God’s decretive will in permitting a ruler is not His approving will.

Samuel Rutherford, Lex Rex (A.D. 1644): “The powers that be are ordained of God… but kings commanding unjust things are but men, and sinful men, and the power by which they do such acts is a sinful and usurped power.”

Q. 3. What is a lawful civil magistrate?

A. A lawful civil magistrate is one whose government hath the morally excellent character befitting the ordinance of God — one that is not a terror to good works, but to the evil (Romans 13:3); that ruleth justly in the fear of God (2 Samuel 23:3); that maintaineth the true religion of Christ and suppresseth idolatry, heresy, and blasphemy; and that governeth for the genuine good of those under its care.

Q. 4. Is the civil magistrate himself subject to God’s law?

A. Yes, in the first and highest degree. The magistrate holdeth his office under God, not above Him; and the law is king, not the king law. When the magistrate himself refuseth to kiss the Son, he doth not merely fail his subjects — he is the first transgressor of the commandment that constituteth lawful magistracy. As Rutherford wrote: “Truth to Christ cannot be treason to Caesar.”

Q. 5. Did our Lord Christ, in saying “Render unto Caesar,” declare Caesar to be a lawful magistrate?

A. No. Our Lord said, render what is lawfully Caesar’s — leaving entirely open the prior question of what, if anything, was lawfully Caesar’s. He gave an answer so precisely framed that neither Pharisees nor Herodians could use His words against Him (Luke 20:26). The answer is found from a thorough study of God’s entire Word, not from this saying alone.

Q. 6. Are the nations of Scotland, England, and Ireland still bound by the Solemn League and Covenant?

A. Yes. Nations, like individuals, have a moral person binding them to solemn covenants sworn in God’s name. The Solemn League and Covenant of A.D. 1643 perpetually bindeth those nations and their posterity — including all who inhabit the United Kingdom and the wider Anglosphere today, whose settler founders carried those covenant obligations with them — to maintain the Reformed religion, extirpate false worship, and preserve the king’s authority only in the preservation and defence of the true religion. This obligation cannot be dissolved by national apostasy, the passage of time, or the will of later generations.

Q. 7. Is it sufficient for a magistrate to pay lip-service to Christian obligations in his constitutional oath?

A. No. The Lord seeth through all insincerity and hypocrisy. The Solemn League and Covenant required its subscribers to labour with their estates and lives, sincerely, really, and constantly. A magistrate who taketh a vestigial Christian oath — such as the Coronation Oath of Great Britain — and thereafter promotes and establishes what God forbids, and who faileth to own the binding national covenant attainments of the nation over which he ruleth, is not in a materially different position from one who repudiates all Christian obligation; for he addeth the aggravation of oath-breaking to his covenant-breaking. The nominal retention of Christian constitutional forms is not without all significance — it distinguisheth such a nation from one that explicitly repudiates Christ in its founding documents — but it falls altogether short of the standard God requireth, and is no ground for owning such a government as a lawful Christian magistracy.

Q. 8. What are the three tiers of obligation, and how do they differ?

A. The first tier is the pagan or unevangelised nation — not yet brought under the covenant light of the Gospel — whose magistrates may be submitted to as exercising natural law functions, insofar as they protect the just rights of citizens without imposing false religion or persecuting faithful Christians. The second tier is the Christian-heritage or Anglosphere nation — one whose legal settlement was shaped by the Reformation, or whose founders carried covenant obligations with them — which faces a higher standard, being in the position of Israel rather than Egypt. The third tier is the formally covenanted nation — Scotland, England, and Ireland, together with their posterity — which is bound by the most stringent obligations of all, having sworn perpetual covenant with the Lord in His own name. The Westminster Confession’s statement that “infidelity, or difference in religion, doth not make void the magistrate’s just and legal authority” referreth to the first tier only, and hath no application to covenanted or Christian-heritage nations.

Q. 9. May a Christian submit to the civil government of an unlawful government?

A. He ought indeed to submit to all its lawful commands — not merely out of fear, as a matter of prudential necessity, but out of conscience toward God Himself, whose moral authority underlieth every lawful command regardless of the character of the instrument through which it is issued; for it is God’s Law that is obeyed, not the unlawful ruler’s person. But he cannot submit to such a government as a lawful magistracy — that is, as the Lord’s ordained minister for good in the sense of Romans 13:4 — for it hath inverted that very description; and to own it as such would be to render to the creature the honour that belongeth to God alone. He that payeth taxes to such a government under compulsion doth not thereby acknowledge its legitimacy; but he that payeth for conscience’ sake, as though to a lawful minister of God, ceaseth to be a faithful witness.

Q. 10. What is the difference between ordinary taxation and a declaredly wicked tax?

A. Ordinary taxation is that levied for the general purposes of civil order — payable for wrath’s sake even under an unlawful government, not for conscience’ sake. A declaredly wicked tax is one whose very enactment stateth an explicitly sinful purpose from its own terms — as did the Scottish cess of A.D. 1678, levied by open declaration for the suppression of faithful Gospel meetings. Such a tax must be refused; for to pay it is active and knowing participation in the specific declared evil.

Q. 11. Is it possible to live in this fallen world without making use of things tainted by the sin of others?

A. No. The fall hath so pervaded the works and institutions of men that no instrument, product, or service in common use is wholly free from taint. To avoid all such contact would require a man to go out of the world altogether.

Q. 12. Doth not Holy Scripture command separation from evil? How then may tainted instruments ever be used?

A. Holy Scripture doth command separation from evil — specifically, from those called a brother who live in manifest and unrepented sin within the visible church (1 Corinthians 5:11). Those who are without, making no Christian profession, are left to God’s judgment; and the Christian is not called to separate from all commerce and contact with the fallen world and its institutions. Furthermore, a false asceticism — multiplying prohibitions beyond what God’s Word requireth — hath a shew of wisdom in will worship but is itself condemned in Scripture (Colossians 2:21–23).

Q. 13. What is the difference between formal and material cooperation with evil?

A. Formal cooperation is when a man shareth in the intention and purpose of the wrongdoer; it is always sinful. Material cooperation is when a man maketh use of something produced through another’s wrong, without sharing that intention. Material cooperation is further graduated: immediate is more serious than mediate; proximate more serious than remote; active more serious than passive. The closer the cooperation approacheth the original sin, the greater the moral warrant required to justify it.

Q. 14. What criteria determine whether material cooperation with evil is lawful?

A. Several criteria are to be applied together: whether the taint is constitutive of the instrument itself or merely historical and indirect; whether present use actively sustaineth the original evil; whether the evil is the declared purpose of the instrument or an incidental corruption of an otherwise lawful one; whether restitution hath been made, or the wrong continueth with full impunity; whether genuinely equivalent alternatives exist; and whether the wrongdoer maketh any Christian profession — since obligations of separation are most stringent toward those called a brother. No single criterion is decisive; they are to be weighed together.

Q. 15. Is there a difference between the 1 Corinthians 5 categorical distinction and the moral dependency principle?

A. Yes, and the distinction is important. The 1 Corinthians 5 within/without distinction governeth personal fellowship and ecclesiastical association — it is most stringent toward those who profess the name of Christ whilst living in manifest sin. The moral dependency principle governeth a different question: whether a specific product or instrument carrieth moral dependency upon a specific act of wickedness in its very constitution. These two principles operate on different ground and must not be conflated. A secular company making no Christian profession may still produce an instrument whose character is constituted by a specific declared evil; the 1 Corinthians 5 distinction doth not dissolve that moral dependency.

Q. 16. What is a scrupulous conscience, and is it to be commended?

A. A scrupulous conscience is one that maketh that to be sin which God hath not declared to be sin, multiplying obligations beyond what Holy Scripture requireth. It is not a mark of superior holiness but of a conscience imperfectly informed by God’s Word. It is to be corrected by careful study of the Word, not commended as piety. As Baxter observed: “He that will join in no good that is mixed by men with faultiness and evil must separate from all the world, and all from him: But how will he separate from himself?”

Q. 17. In what manner ought the Christian to use the instruments of this present world?

A. He ought to use them, and not abuse them; holding them as a pilgrim in a foreign country — gratefully, wisely, and without making them his home. He is to redeem the time: to buy up and consecrate to worthy and fruitful purpose the hours God’s providence hath placed before him, knowing that the days are evil and that the fashion of this world is passing away.

Q. 18. What remaining obligations doth the lawful use of a tainted instrument carry?

A. It carrieth several. The Christian useth the instrument with thanksgiving to God, who hath in His common grace brought forth something profitable from the works of fallen men. He maintaineth a continuing moral concern for the wrongs that attended its production, and beareth faithful witness against those wrongs. He preferreth cleaner alternatives where they become genuinely available and practicable. He holdeth the instrument loosely, ready to relinquish it should his conscience, better instructed, bind him to do so. And he refuseth to allow his use of it to be construed as an endorsement of the evil that produced it, any more than Paul’s use of Roman roads was an endorsement of the slave labour that built them.

Q. 19. What comfort may the Christian take when, after careful and prayerful inquiry, uncertainty remaineth?

A. He may take comfort in the grace of Christ, who is the propitiation for sins of ignorance as well as presumptuous sins, and who hath not left His people without the Spirit of wisdom and counsel. He may take comfort in the biblical pattern, which consistently sheweth that God doth not reckon the taint of a fallen world to the account of those who use it wisely and without shared intention in its wrong. He may take comfort in the promise that where the heart is sincerely bent toward obedience, God doth not deal with His people after the strict rigour of the law but according to covenant mercy. And he may take comfort in the assurance that the final accounting is left not to the imperfect courts of this present world, but to the perfectly just Judge of all the earth, before whom all things shall be made plain.

Soli Deo Gloria.

A Confession of Faith
Concerning the Christian's Use of Tainted Instruments
in a Fallen World, and the Obligation of Civil Government

Drawn from Holy Scripture, the Standards of the Covenanted Reformation,
and the Reformed Casuistical Tradition

Fifth and revised edition

Chapter I — Of God’s Providence Over a Fallen World

I. God, the sovereign Lord and Creator of all things, doth so uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least, that nothing in this world cometh to pass but by His will and appointment; insomuch that even the wickedness of men, and the sinful corruptions of the institutions they devise, are all ordered by His wise and holy providence to His own glory and the good of His people.

II. Forasmuch as the Fall hath corrupted not only the nature of man but the works of his hands, and the institutions of society, commerce, and government are all permeated with the effects of sin; and forasmuch as the whole world lieth in wickedness (1 John 5:19); it followeth that no instrument, product, service, or institution devised by fallen men is wholly free from taint or corruption in its origin, production, or governance. This is the common condition of life in a fallen world, and is no new thing under the sun.

III. Yet God hath not therefore abandoned the world, nor withdrawn His common grace from the affairs of men. He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust (Matthew 5:45); and by His common grace doth restrain sin, preserve order, and bring forth from the labours of fallen men things that may be received with thanksgiving by those who are His. Moreover, the Christian is called not to a posture of total renunciation of the world’s instruments, but to a wise and temperate use of them, holding them loosely as one who knoweth that this present world and all its fashion is passing away. The time itself, in these evil days, is to be redeemed — that is, bought up and consecrated to wise and fruitful purpose — which urgency doth increase, and not diminish, as the world groweth darker.

Chapter II — Of the Nature of Lawful Civil Government

I. God, the supreme Lord and King of all the world, hath ordained civil magistrates to be under Him and over the people, for His own glory and the public good; and to this end hath armed them with the power of the sword, for the punishment of evildoers and the praise of them that do well. The office of the civil magistrate is a divinely appointed institution, holy and necessary; and all lawful authority within this sphere proceedeth from God through His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Prince of the kings of the earth, to whom all dominion hath been given by the Father. The law is king, and not the king law; and God’s Moral Law, being the supreme law of the universe, is the standard by which every government and every magistrate standeth or falleth.

The maxim Lex Rex — “the law is king” — is the title and governing principle of Samuel Rutherford’s great work of A.D. 1644, written in defence of the Covenanted Reformation against the absolutist claims of the Stuart monarchy.

II. The five positive characteristics of a fully lawful civil government — drawn from the testimony of Psalm 2 and the uniform witness of the faithful Reformed confessions — are these: first, official acknowledgement of the Triune God of the Bible as the source of all civil authority; second, the Lord Jesus Christ acknowledged as the only Mediator with dominion over all nations and kings; third, the Moral Law of God, as summarised in the Ten Commandments, held as the supreme law of the land; fourth, the one true Christian religion established and maintained as the religion of the nation, with idolatry, heresy, and blasphemy suppressed; and fifth, civil magistrates required by solemn oath to profess and uphold these things. A government that doth not own all five of these characteristics in its constitution and laws is not a lawful Christian government in the full biblical sense; and that which a nation officially tolerateth by law, it officially promoteth, establisheth, and protecteth by law. A nation that officially tolerateth all religions is therefore a nation that hath established polytheism as its official religion.

The Scots Confession of A.D. 1560, Article 24: “Moreover, to kings, princes, rulers, and magistrates, we affirm that chiefly and most principally the conservation and purgation of the religion appertains.”

Westminster Confession of Faith, 23.3: “He hath authority, and it is his duty, to take order, that… all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed.”

III. The “higher powers” to which the apostle Paul commandeth submission in Romans 13:1 are not to be understood as referring to every government that may hold power by God’s providence, whether tyrant or persecutor alike. For the Greek word rendered “higher” (huperechousais) in Paul’s other uses denoteth not mere positional rank but moral excellence and superior quality — as in Philippians 4:7, where the peace of God passeth all understanding, not merely outranks it; and as in Philippians 3:8, where Paul counteth all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ. So here the “higher powers” are those that have the morally excellent character befitting the ordinance of God. This interpretation is confirmed by what Paul immediately addeth: that such rulers “are not a terror to good works, but to the evil” (Romans 13:3) — a description not of any government whatsoever, but of a morally qualified government specifically.

IV. A government that doth not answer to the description Paul giveth in Romans 13:3–4 — one that is a terror to good works rather than evil, that protecteth and promoteth idolatry, heresy, blasphemy, the murder of unborn children, and every abomination — is, Scripturally speaking, an unlawful government. It holdeth power by God’s permissive providence, even as He permitted Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, and Nero; but the power by which it doth such acts is, in Rutherford’s exact words, “a sinful and usurped power.” Such a government hath not forfeited a qualification whilst retaining its lawfulness — it hath ceased to be a lawful government altogether. Covenanted Christians cannot, and all Christians should not, own such magistrates to be lawful magistrates or to be the ministers of God in the sense of Romans 13:4. They ought indeed to be submitted to in all their lawful commands — not merely out of fear, as a matter of prudential necessity, but out of conscience toward God Himself, whose moral authority underlieth every lawful command regardless of the character of the instrument through which it is issued; for it is God’s Law that is obeyed, not the unlawful ruler’s person. But they cannot be submitted to as lawful magistrates — that is, as the Lord’s ordained ministers for good in the sense of Romans 13:4 — for they have inverted that very description; and to own them as such would be to render to the creature the honour that belongeth to God alone.

Samuel Rutherford, Lex Rex (A.D. 1644): “The powers that be are ordained of God… but kings commanding unjust things are but men, and sinful men, and the power by which they do such acts is a sinful and usurped power.”

V. The civil magistrate is appointed of God not only for the maintenance of civil order and the protection of persons and property according to the Second Table of the Law, but also for the defence of the true religion and the suppression of idolatry, heresy, blasphemy, and false worship according to the First Table of the Law; for idolatry and false religion are treasonous acts against God and bring His righteous judgment upon the nations that harbour them. God’s decretive will in permitting an unlawful ruler is not the same as His approving will; even as Christ’s crucifixion was decreed of God, yet was nevertheless the greatest of crimes. The institution of magistracy remaineth holy, even when the particular instance of it is corrupt and unlawful; as the institution of marriage remaineth holy, even when a particular union is adulterous.

Chapter III — Of Covenanted Nations and Their Perpetual Obligations

I. Nations, like individuals, have a moral person which bindeth them to the obligations of God’s moral law. And as individuals may enter into solemn covenant with the Lord, so may nations; and such national covenants, once solemnly sworn, do bind not only those who swore them but their posterity, for the covenant Lord is faithful across generations and doth not forget what hath been pledged in His name.

II. Three tiers of obligation must be carefully distinguished, according to the degree of covenant light a nation hath received.

First, pagan or unevangelised nations — those not yet brought under the covenant light of the Gospel — whose magistrates may yet be submitted to as exercising natural law functions, protecting the just rights of citizens, neither imposing false religion upon them nor persecuting faithful Christians. These are in the position of Egypt under Pharaoh in Joseph’s time, and may be owned as exercising a measure of lawful civil authority insofar as they fulfil the natural law function. The Westminster Confession of Faith’s statement that “infidelity, or difference in religion, doth not make void the magistrate’s just and legal authority” referreth to this tier — to those nations where the light of the Gospel hath not been infused, and not to covenanted Christian nations.

Second, nations of the Anglosphere and Christian-heritage nations — those whose legal and constitutional heritage was shaped by the Reformation, or whose settler founders carried covenant obligations with them into new lands, extending the obligations of the Solemn League and Covenant of A.D. 1643 to their posterity throughout the world. These stand in a position analogous to Israel rather than Egypt, having received far greater light and having, in many cases, made solemn covenant with the Lord; and they face a correspondingly higher and stricter standard of accountability.

Third, the formally covenanted nations of Scotland, England, and Ireland, together with their dominions and posterity, who did in the Solemn League and Covenant of A.D. 1643 enter into a perpetual covenant with the Lord their God. This covenant cannot be dissolved by the mere passage of time, by national apostasy, or by the will of later generations; for the covenant Lord bindeth posterity as He bound the fathers.

Westminster Confession of Faith, 23.4: “Infidelity, or difference in religion, doth not make void the magistrate’s just and legal authority.” This statement was written of nations not yet evangelised, not of covenanted Christian nations — a distinction critical to its correct application.

III. Furthermore, a vital distinction must be maintained between lip-service and active labour. The Coronation Oath of the sovereign of Great Britain retaineth a nominal Christian form, requiring the maintenance of “the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law”; and this is not entirely without significance — it distinguisheth Great Britain in constitutional form from an explicitly secular republic. Yet swearing and labouring are different in kind, and not merely in degree. The Solemn League and Covenant required its subscribers to labour with their estates and lives, with sincerity, reality, and constancy. A magistrate who taketh a vestigial Christian oath and thereafter actively promotes and establishes what God forbids is not in a materially different position from one who repudiates all Christian obligation — for he hath added the aggravation of oath-breaking to his covenant-breaking. The Lord, who seeth through all insincerity and hypocrisy, is not honoured by constitutional forms that are hollowed out by the deeds that follow them.

IV. That the Solemn League and Covenant remaineth binding in the sight of God upon the nations of Great Britain — notwithstanding all that hath since transpired in their civil and ecclesiastical history — is not a contention that can be dissolved by the mere force of subsequent events. The covenant was sworn with solemnity before the Eternal God, in His own name, and with the explicit acknowledgement that its obligations extended to posterity. What men have since done to repudiate it, they have done without God’s leave and without power to release themselves from its bond. A wife who abandoneth her husband and taketh another hath not thereby dissolved her marriage in the eyes of God; she hath become an adulteress. So the nations that have abandoned the covenant Lord have not made their position better, but worse.

The history of how this covenant was repudiated is one of the great national sins of these islands, and it is needful briefly to rehearse it, that the gravity of the present constitutional arrangement may be rightly understood. By A.D. 1643, the Solemn League and Covenant had been sworn by the Parliaments and churches of Scotland, England, and Ireland; the Westminster Assembly had been convened in its service; and the most thoroughgoing Reformed settlement ever achieved in these lands was underway. Yet within a generation it was overthrown. At the Restoration of Charles II in A.D. 1660, the king — who had himself sworn the Solemn League and Covenant in A.D. 1651 at his coronation at Scone, and whose father had waged war against the Covenanting cause rather than submit to it — immediately and deliberately set about dismantling the entire covenanted work, proving himself one of the most cynical oath-breakers these islands have ever seen. In England, the Act of Uniformity of A.D. 1662 ejected some two thousand faithful ministers from their livings on St. Bartholomew’s Day, the 24th of August, for refusing episcopal re-ordination and refusing to give their unfeigned assent and consent to everything prescribed in the newly revised Book of Common Prayer. But the Act went further still: it required every minister, university lecturer, and schoolmaster to subscribe a Declaration — in these words, from the Act itself — that the Solemn League and Covenant was “in it selfe an unlawfull Oath and imposed upon the Subjects of this Realme against the knowne Lawes and Liberties of this Kingdome.”

Act of Uniformity, 14 Cha. 2. c. 4 (A.D. 1662), Section VI: Declaration required of all ministers, deans, university readers, schoolmasters, and tutors. Text from Statutes of the Realm, Volume 5, 1625–80, ed. John Raithby (s.l., 1819), via British History Online, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/statutes-realm/vol5/pp364-370. This clause was eventually removed from the required Declaration by Section VIII of the same Act after the 25th of March A.D. 1682 — having stood, and done its destructive work, for twenty years.

In Scotland, the same Covenant was burned by the public hangman in Edinburgh; episcopacy was re-imposed upon the Kirk by royal command; and the faithful who refused to submit were driven to the fields, hunted with soldiers, and slaughtered in what became known as “the Killing Time.”

“The Killing Time” refers principally to the years A.D. 1684–1685, during which the persecution of the Covenanting remnant in Scotland reached its most intense and murderous pitch under the administration of the Earl of Lauderdale and others. Richard Cameron, Donald Cargill, James Renwick, and many others suffered martyrdom in this period.

The cess of A.D. 1678, already noted in these pages, was but one instrument of this Erastian tyranny. In A.D. 1690, a Presbyterian church settlement was indeed restored in Scotland — but at the price of Erastianism, the state retaining dominance over the Kirk in a manner incompatible with the Crown Rights of the Redeemer and with the terms of the original covenanted Reformation. The Acts of Union of A.D. 1707 buried the Scottish covenanted settlement still deeper, binding Scotland constitutionally to an English establishment built upon prelacy, crown supremacy, and the explicit burial of the Solemn League and Covenant. The constitutional arrangement that hath descended to Great Britain today is therefore the direct heir of these covenant-breakings — dressed in pomp and ceremony, adorned with Coronation Oaths and state prayers, attended by archbishops and choristers and ancient rites — and is for all that a whitewashed sepulchre. Our Lord’s description of those who garnish the tombs of the prophets whilst in their hearts rejecting them is not inappositely applied to a constitution that retaineth the outward vesture of Christian nationhood whilst its substance was torn away by the very men who swore to preserve it. God is not mocked; and as the Solemn League itself solemnly warned, those who partake in such covenant-breaking are in danger to receive of its plagues.

V. A government of a covenanted nation, or of a Christian-heritage nation whose founders carried covenant obligations with them, that hath officially established the toleration and protection of idolatry, false religion, heresy, blasphemy, and abominations such as the murder of unborn children, is simply an unlawful government. It is not a government with a deficiency; it is not a partially lawful government requiring qualification — it is a government exercising sinful and usurped power in those acts by which it overturns and inverts the Law of the supreme Lawgiver. Such a government may be submitted to out of fear, in things that are otherwise lawful, as a matter of prudential necessity; but it cannot be submitted to out of conscience, as though it were the Lord’s ordained minister for good.

Chapter IV — Of the Payment of Tribute and the Limits of Civil Submission

I. The words of our Lord Christ, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21), are not to be read as a declaration that Caesar was a lawful magistrate with lawful authority over Palestine. Our Lord did not say what belonged to Caesar, nor did He confirm that anything lawfully did. He said, render what is lawfully Caesar’s — leaving the prior question entirely open, framed so precisely that neither Pharisees nor Herodians could use His words against Him (Luke 20:26), because He had not clearly answered their captious question. The answer to what lawfully belongeth to any civil ruler is to be found from a thorough study of God’s entire Word, not from this saying alone.

II. Concerning the payment of tribute, the Scripture and the faithful Covenanting tradition together require the following distinctions to be carefully maintained.

First — Ordinary civil taxation, paid to magistrates for the general maintenance of civil order and the protection of persons and property, may be paid even to an unlawful or wicked government, for wrath’s sake — to avoid punishment and maintain peace — but not for conscience’ sake, as though such a government were thereby acknowledged as the Lord’s lawful minister for good. For to pay taxes for conscience’ sake is an honour reserved for those alone who are lawful ordinances and ministers of God for good (Romans 13:4, 7). One who submitteth to the might of an unlawful ruler doth not thereby submit to his right to rule; and one who payeth taxes under compulsion doth not thereby acknowledge the legitimacy of the government that exacteth them.

Second — A tax that is declaredly and explicitly enacted for a sinful stated purpose from its own terms must be refused, even at great personal cost. Such was the Scottish cess of A.D. 1678, levied by open declaration for the suppression of faithful Gospel meetings; and those faithful Covenanters who refused it did so in accordance with true Christian principle. The distinction is between a tax later misapplied and a tax wicked from its very founding terms.

The cess of A.D. 1678 was levied in Scotland expressly to fund the suppression of field conventicles — the outdoor worship gatherings of the Covenanting faithful who refused to submit to the Erastian settlement. The Cameronian party refused it; others paid under protest.

Third — The Christian who payeth ordinary taxes under legal compulsion, without consent, whilst bearing faithful witness against the evil those taxes fund, is not thereby made a partaker of that evil before God. Yet he ought never to be silent concerning the wickedness he is compelled to fund; for the grief of conscience he feeleth at such compulsion is itself a form of faithfulness.

Chapter V — Of Separation from Evil, and Its Proper Scope

I. The Holy Scripture commandeth believers to have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness (Ephesians 5:11), and to maintain separation from those who walk in manifest sin. Yet this commandment of separation operateth according to a careful distinction that the apostle Paul himself draweth: the duty of non-association is laid upon those who are called a brother — that is, those within the visible church who profess the name of Christ whilst living in manifest and unrepented sin. Those who are without — outside the covenant community, making no Christian profession — are left to God’s judgment; and the Christian is not called to separate from all commerce and contact with them.

II. It followeth from this distinction that a Christian’s obligation of non-association with a secular company or institution making no Christian profession is governed by different and less stringent principles than his obligation of non-association with a self-professing Christian body engaged in the same conduct. Nevertheless, this distinction governeth the question of personal fellowship and ecclesiastical association — it doth not by itself dissolve the separate question of moral dependency upon specific acts of wickedness in the products one receiveth, which is governed by its own principles operating independently of the profession of the wrongdoer.

III. The Christian is equally warned against a false asceticism — a man-made religion of self-denial that multiplieth prohibitions beyond what God’s Word requireth, having a shew of wisdom in will worship but proving of no value against genuine sin. The standard is not the most restrictive position conceivable, but the one faithfully derived from Holy Scripture and applied with sanctified wisdom.

IV. Some, rightly perceiving the depth of corruption in the supply chains, institutions, and civil arrangements of the present age, have concluded that the faithful Christian is obligated to pursue a thoroughgoing agrarian self-sufficiency — withdrawing from the commerce, technology, and economies of the fallen world-system as completely as circumstances permit, and building in their place close-knit, land-based communities that minimise dependency upon tainted instruments altogether. This counsel is not without genuine wisdom and biblical warrant as a directional principle: the creational mandate to dress and keep the earth (Genesis 2:15), the prophetic vision of every man under his vine and fig tree (Micah 4:4), and the pilgrim’s proper looseness of grip upon this present world all commend a glad preference for simplicity, for stewardship of God’s creation, and for the reduction of entanglement with corrupt systems where such reduction is genuinely available. A family or community that by God’s providence hath the land, the skill, and the occasion to live in greater independence from the corruptions of the present age may receive that circumstance with thankfulness as a signal mercy.

Yet this counsel errs when it is elevated from a providential blessing and a sanctified aspiration into a universal binding obligation — as though those to whom God hath not given land, community, or circumstance are thereby placed in a state of sin. Holy Scripture doth not so teach. The Apostle Paul laboured as a tent-maker in the cities of the Roman world, using its roads, its courts, and its citizenship for the advance of the Gospel without rebuke (Acts 16:37; 25:11). Daniel and his companions served at the heart of Babylon’s administration for decades (Daniel 1–6). Joseph sustained the nations of the known world from the granaries of Egypt (Genesis 41–47). None of these are censured for failing to withdraw from the world’s systems; all are commended for faithful stewardship within them. The standard, as ever, is not the most thoroughgoing withdrawal conceivable, but the one faithfully derived from Holy Scripture.

Furthermore, it is to be noted that the communities which have most consistently pursued this agrarian withdrawal — among them those of the Anabaptist tradition, such as the Amish — have done so upon a theological foundation that the Reformed faith cannot own: the Anabaptist two-kingdoms dualism which removes Christ’s Kingship from the civil realm altogether, confines the church to a gathered community of the visibly regenerate entirely separate from the state, and treats all civil participation, oath-swearing, and magisterial authority as incompatible with Christian discipleship. This is precisely the position that Psalm 2 and the whole testimony of the covenanted Reformation refute. The social withdrawal and the theological error are in this case inseparable: the agrarian community is the practical outworking of a theology that denies the very Crown Rights of the Redeemer over nations which it is the duty of every Christian to assert.

The true and final answer to the corruption of the world’s systems is not the withdrawal of the remnant into separated communities, but the Covenanted Reformation of those systems themselves — the conversion of the nations, the establishment of Christ’s Kingship over the civil realm, and the progressive advance of His Kingdom until the knowledge of the LORD covereth the earth as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:9; Habakkuk 2:14). When Christian magistrates govern according to God’s Law, and when the commerce and institutions of nations are ordered by the fear of the LORD, the casuistical burden of navigating tainted instruments is lightened not by withdrawal but by reformation. The agrarian aspiration answers a question — how shall the remnant separate from a corrupt world-system? — that the advancing Kingdom progressively dissolves by reforming the system itself. The garden is not abandoned in the end; it is glorified. “And they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it.” (Micah 4:4)

Chapter VI — Of the Christian’s Use of Tainted Instruments

I. The Christian living in a fallen world doth inevitably make use of instruments, products, services, and institutions whose origins, supply chains, or governance are in whole or in part the fruit of sin. This is unavoidable short of a total withdrawal from the world, which the Lord Jesus Christ doth not command. Furthermore, the Christian is expressly called to use the world’s instruments whilst not abusing them, holding them as a pilgrim who knoweth that this present world and all its fashion is transient; and to redeem the time — that is, to buy up and consecrate to worthy purpose the hours God’s providence hath placed before him, precisely because the days are evil.

II. The Holy Scripture furnisheth many examples of godly men and women who made use of tainted instruments — and even of things built in wickedness — without sin: Jacob’s household sustained by Egyptian grain produced by the machinery of a pagan slave empire (Genesis 41–47); the Tabernacle built from the spoil of Egypt, and the Temple from the materials and skilled labour of pagan Phoenicia, God filling both with His own glory (Exodus 35–36; 1 Kings 5; 8:10–11); Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego dwelling within Babylon, built in rebellion against God, and serving its administration faithfully for decades (Daniel 1–6); the walls of Jerusalem rebuilt by Artaxerxes’ pagan funding and Persian timber (Nehemiah 2:8); the Lord Christ Himself handling the denarius bearing Caesar’s image (Matthew 22:20); and the Apostle Paul using Roman roads, Roman citizenship, and Roman courts for the advance of the Gospel (Acts 16:37; 25:11). Most profoundly of all, the Cross itself — an instrument designed by pagan Rome for terror and degradation — became the instrument of the world’s redemption, and is now the glory of every believer:

III. The moral weight attaching to the use of any tainted instrument is to be assessed by reference both to the cooperation it involves and to the character of the dependency upon the original wrong. Regarding cooperation, the following distinctions must be carefully maintained.

Formal cooperation — wherein the user shareth the intention and purpose of the wrongdoer — is always sinful and forbidden without exception.

Material cooperation — wherein use is made of what another produced through wrong, without sharing that intention — is not by itself sinful, but requireth careful further assessment.

Within material cooperation, the following graduated distinctions apply: immediate cooperation, wherein one cooperateth in the sinful act itself, is gravely wrong; mediate cooperation, wherein one provideth conditions by which the act becomes possible without directly performing it, is more remote and requireth less moral weight to justify. Proximate cooperation is more serious and requireth greater moral warrant; remote cooperation, further removed in time, causation, and material distance from the original act, requireth less. Active cooperation, performing an act that furthers the original sin, is more serious than passive cooperation, which merely maketh use of an existing outcome without furthering the sin. The general principle is this: the closer one approacheth an immorality in material cooperation with it, the greater the moral warrant required; the further the distance, the less.

Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory (A.D. 1673): “He that will join in no good that is mixed by men with faultiness and evil must separate from all the world, and all from him: But how will he separate from himself?”

IV. Regarding the character of the dependency upon the original wrong, the following criteria are to be applied together and not in isolation: whether the taint is constitutive of the instrument itself, or historical and indirect; whether present use actively sustaineth the original evil, or not; whether the evil is the declared purpose of the instrument, or an incidental corruption of an otherwise lawful one; whether restitution hath been made or pursued, or the wrong continueth with full impunity; whether genuinely equivalent alternatives exist; and whether the wrongdoer maketh any Christian profession — since obligations of separation are most stringent toward those called a brother.

V. Where the criteria of constitutive dependency, active sustaining of ongoing evil, declared wicked purpose, and formal or immediate cooperation all simultaneously obtain — and where plainly equivalent alternatives exist — the Christian’s conscience is bound to refuse the instrument. Where the criteria are distributed — the cooperation being passive, mediate, and remote; the taint historical and indirect; the purpose of the instrument otherwise lawful; the use not sustaining the specific original wrong; and refusal amounting in practice to a withdrawal from legitimate life — the Christian may receive and use what God’s providence hath placed before him, with thanksgiving, prayer, continued witness against the evil, preference for cleaner alternatives as they become genuinely accessible, and the looseness of grip that becometh a pilgrim in a foreign land.

Chapter VII — Of the Conscience, and Its Proper Governance

I. God alone is Lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are in any thing contrary to His Word, or beside it in matters of faith or worship. It is the duty and privilege of every believer to maintain a conscience well-informed by Holy Scripture and the moral law, neither adding to the obligations God hath imposed nor subtracting from them.

II. A scrupulous conscience, which maketh that to be sin which God hath not declared to be sin, is not a mark of superior holiness but a spiritual disorder requiring remedy through better instruction from the Word of God. Satan hath an interest in keeping the conscientious believer entangled in imaginary obligations, that he may be distracted from genuine holiness and genuine witness. A seared or careless conscience, equally, falleth short. The right disposition is the informed and calibrated conscience that asketh what God’s Word actually requireth, applyeth it carefully, holdeth the world’s instruments without abuse and without undue attachment, and resteth in the grace of Christ for what remaineth uncertain.

A companion Catechism on the same subjects, in question-and-answer form, is offered as a separate post.

Soli Deo Gloria.

And yet — the promises of God are not broken.

The Testimony That Remains

There is a peculiar comfort afforded to those who walk in the paths of the old Covenanters: the knowledge that they too saw the desolation of what had been built, and yet they did not despair. Richard Cameron, dying at Airdsmoss, is reported to have said before the battle, “Lord, spare the green and take the ripe.” He was twenty-six years of age.

Richard Cameron (c. 1648–1680), the Lion of the Covenant, field preacher and leader of the Cameronians, killed at the skirmish of Airdsmoss.

The testimony did not end with his death. It was continued by those who gathered his mantle: by Cargill, by Renwick, and by the faithful who signed the Sanquhar Declaration and refused the indulgences of a corrupt and Erastian church-state.

A Present Application

We who remain in these latter days must learn the same lesson. The desolation is real. We are not to pretend otherwise, nor to baptise the present ruin with comfortable language. But neither are we to lose heart, as though the Covenant God of Israel had forgotten His oath.

The promise is sure. The Reformation of these lands shall yet come again — not by the arm of flesh, nor by political cunning, but by the sovereign grace of the God who sweareth by Himself.

Until that day, we record. We testify. We pray.

Soli Deo Gloria.