Render to Caesar What is Caesar’s

In yesterday’s article, we highlighted the general weakness of the church in its thinking on government. It is so weak, that when I use the word government, many Christian readers will automatically assume that I am talking about state government. Some will be unaware of any other God-ordained governments. This is because we live in an era where the state government has increased in power and usurped the power of other legitimate and God-ordained spheres of government causing these to atrophy.

In my experience, when one talks to Christians who have imbibed the statist culture about the immorality of the state’s involvement in education, healthcare and welfare or of the evil of redistributionist taxes, one does not have to wait long before one is told that Christians ought to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. What is most frustrating about these conversations is that what is Caesar’s is automatically assumed to be the status quo. It seems Caesar can never overreach his authority.

The Context

So today we will briefly look at this passage. Jesus was nearing the end of his earthly ministry, and he had aroused the envy-ridden ire of the religious leaders. Jesus had just not-so-subtly condemned them for their unwillingness to submit to him and celebrate him as the son of God in a parable that ended in their destruction and the destruction of their city, a not so subtle reference to Jerusalem. In response, the Pharisees set about fulfilling the prophecy by plotting to entangle Jesus. They wanted to get rid of him. However, Jesus had not only made enemies of the religious leaders, but also the political leaders. Herod was not so fond of him either.

This led, as it has throughout history, to the odd alliance of secular power with religious leadership. Some of the disciples of the Pharisees and some Herodians joined together in an attempt to trap Jesus. The Pharisees hated the idea of Jews paying taxes to some foreign overlord. The Herodians, like Herod, were cosied up to the Romans and wanted the status quo to remain. So this unusual alliance comes to Jesus with flattering words. The attempted trap was a question. “Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” The trap was laid and ready to be sprung. They thought they had Jesus. They knew his claim – to be the son of the king. They had witnessed the Messianic triumphal entry. They had rebuked him for not suppressing the kingly ascriptions of the crowd and children who entered the temple precincts with him. They knew the Scriptures. The Messiah would rule the nations and dash his enemies to pieces. But they did not believe Jesus was the Messiah.

So their trap was an attempt to force Jesus to make explicit what had been implicit up until this time or suffer the wrath of the people. If Jesus was truly the Messiah, they expected he would own it by saying everything belongs to me, and therefore Caesar does not have the right to take money from the Jews, my people. This would make him an enemy to Caesar who would brook no opposition to his claims to deity and rule. That would mean death. If on the other hand he wavered and claimed Caesar had the authority to tax the Jews, he would lose the popularity that so provoked them.

Jesus Reply and Its Meaning

So this is the context of Jesus’ reply. It was a trap. Jesus knew his time was very near, but it was not yet. He must die when the times were fulfilled. He had to be the Passover lamb. So Jesus asks for a coin to be brought to him. He asks whose inscription is on the coin. Of course, it is the image of Caesar. Then Jesus says, “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God, what is God’s.” The response of those who heard this was to marvel. Jesus had not been trapped and answered in an amazing way. Our problem is we don’t see how amazing his answer was. It was not an answer that ruled in favour of the Herodians or the Pharisees. If we don’t get that, we miss what we should marvel at. Jesus took the trap by its jaws and broke it.

First of all, his listeners are told to render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, or what is due to him. That means Caesar does have things that are due to him. Caesar can tax. Caesar does have a legitimate realm in which to exercise authority. The Pharisees, whose hatred for the Romans caused them to reject the tax, hated authority in general. Their king had come, and they plotted how to take his authority. To them, Jesus says, “There are things that you must render to Caesar.”

But there is more. And this is what our modern secularised statist Christians fail to understand. Too often, Christians assume that Jesus is saying that government has carte blanche on what Caesar owns and ought to be rendered. When they tell us to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s they leave the very question of what belongs to Caesar unanswered. They assume Caesar is due everything he claims he is due. Why? Because their secular education with its idol of state and demos has trained them in worship well.

However, as Douglas Wilson often points out, one of the things Caesar is not rendered is the right to determine what should be rendered to him! Jesus’ answer was not simply “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s.” He finished by saying, “and to God what is God’s.”

The very coin that Jesus asked for, the denarius, had an inscription of Caesar on the coin, and would have had the words “Tiberius Caesar Augustus Son to the Divine Augustus” and on the other side, “Highest Priest”. Do these titles belong to Caesar? Should the early Christians have rendered them to him? Well considering he lies dead to this day awaiting the command of Christ to come out from his grave….of course not. Caesar thought he ought to have these titles rendered to him but they belong to Christ.

Furthermore, his first-century audience, well-versed in Scriptures would have been reminded of another image on something more valuable than a cold dead piece of metal. Man was stamped with the very image of God. Thus each one of those men in front of Jesus ought to have been rendered to God. The Pharisees, who stood in the way of the king ought to have bowed down before him. The supporters of the immoral Herod ought to have given themselves to Christ. All men ought to be rendered to God. All positions of authority ought to be rendered to God. All things ought to be rendered to God, because they are all his.

What does this mean? It means Caesar ought to render himself to God, by governing according to God’s laws, and not arrogating to himself what God has given to others. If he refuses to do this, he is not following Christ’s dictum here. In these very words, Jesus signaled the coming of the end to all totalitarians and self-aggrandizing powers. Nimrod in the days of the tower of Babel, the Pharaohs of Egypt, the kings and rulers of Assyria, Babylon and Persia and Greece, and yes, the Caesars of Rome were totalitarians. They abused and oppressed their citizens. But now, Christ has come, and he sounds the warning to all would-be oppressive regimes. Their end is nigh. Christ is king. He rules. Rulers and enemies who take counsel against him will be dashed in pieces. For he reigns. His yoke is easy and his burden light. And he shall have dominion, not they.

As Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire, it conquered in a slow and gradual way. Even Caesar eventually rendered himself to God. As this took place, and as the fruit of Christianity gradually spread over the ensuing two millennia, where Christ’s kingdom has held sway, tyrants have been toppled and a Christian view of government has gradually developed and influenced society giving freedom to citizens. It is because of Christ’s words here in Matthew, and elsewhere that absolute monarchy was abolished. It is because of his words that the Constitution which granted rights to the individual became the founding document of the United States of America. Christ’s rule and reign brings freedom from the old way of tyranny. Unfortunately, as nations turn against Christ and embrace the idol of statism, they will once again suffer tyranny. If we will not render ourselves to God, He will hand us over to the not-so-tender love of our false gods.

In our current setting, we are really in little danger of refusing to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. This is not a problem many of us have. But in what seems a common danger, our leaders will use verses like these ones to challenge us on a sin that few of us are likely to commit while neglecting to highlight the very real danger almost all of us are in. “Make sure you give Caesar his due,” they remind their law-abiding congregations as we struggle to support our families on one income under exorbitant redistributive taxes that reward idleness and immorality. We will rail against a sin that we are unlikely to be committing because it’s more comfortable that way, and our religious leaders can remain ‘respectable’ in the eyes of the secular elite. Once again, just as in Jesus’ time, our religious leaders and secular leaders seem united in their opposition to Christ’s claims of universal lordship.

Let us not settle for that uneasy truce. Let us remember the things we ought to render to God. First of all, we render ourselves to God, not Caesar. We belong to God, not our rulers. When our governments try to tyrannise us or threaten us as if we belong to them, we should tell them in no uncertain terms that they ought to render themselves to God, and that we most certainly will never render ourselves to them. We will say as one, “I will never render complete and utter obedience to you, because I belong to God, and therefore I am not your slave. I was bought by Christ and I am now free.”

Secondly, we will never render our children to them. My children have the very image of God stamped on them. Of course they do not belong to the government! Therefore I will not let an out-of-control and self-aggrandizing government take my children and brainwash them in their overweening attempts at control through education. That would be idolatry on my part. So I say to the state, “They are not your children, they belong to Christ.”

Thirdly we will not render our work to the government. Sure, because they are bigger than us, and can unjustly take our money from us to give to their pet idolatries, we might be bullied and forced to give up the fruits of our labour. But we will recognise that this labour and its fruit does not belong to them. God has called each man to the task of dominion. As God enjoyed the fruit of his work, and blessed it, so each man ought to enjoy the fruit of his own work. It ought not to be confiscated from him and its blessing be transferred to another. This is unjust, and the God of justice will judge such wickedness.

Fourthly and on a related note, we will remind them, and our fellow citizens that the role of the state is a minister of the sword. God appoints the state to administer justice. They are stewards of the authority he gives them. Christians who are not naive realise that despite allowing the state to bear the sword, Christ does not authorise it to kill indiscriminately or make up its own standards of justice. This same logic applies to the role of the state. Yes, Christ commands us to render tax to Caesar and Caesar can lawfully tax. But that does not mean he cannot unlawfully tax. When Caesar taxes to usurp authority that Christ has not given him, he is in rebellion against Christ. Christ has given the state a particular role. It is not the minister of welfare. Nor is it the minister of education. And it certainly isn’t the minister of economics. It is not minister of the Word and Sacrament. Whenever the state steps outside of its God-given bounds, it is rebelling against its king, Jesus Christ. We will do all we can to encourage our fellow Christians to reject the idolatry of statism and to worship Christ alone. We will encourage them to reject the easy, but almost always idolatrous answer to all problems that begins with the words, “The government needs to…” We will work to see the state reject its idolatry and fulfill the calling Christ has given it. This means we need the gospel of Christ’s lordship to be preached and accepted in the hearts of our fellow citizens. Repent and believe. Christ is Lord, not Caesar.

The Biblical Role of Government

For too long now, Christians in the West have not really had to think too hard about the biblical role of government. We have lived in the afterglow of a civilization raised up by Christian presence in the past. Thus tyranny, where the gospel shone its light was eventually destroyed. It is unfortunate for us that we have forgotten the lessons learned through centuries of persecution and tyrannical governments. If we are not careful, we are set to learn them again; the hard way.

The all too common response of pastors and Christian leaders in the evangelical church at least in my experience in New Zealand is to assume since state government is ordained by God there are really very few biblical limits on what it can do. Christians are told to submit unless we are told to do something that is a sin. This seems a little too simplistic to me.

In the evangelical church, this naivety is regrettably combined with a dualistic worldview. The gospel is seen as about personal salvation rather than the universal kingship of Christ. Faith is expressed in the private sphere through prayer and Bible reading. The standard held up of faithful Christianity often involves giving up ‘the things of this world’ like a difficult job in order to spend more time helping out in ‘Christian’ (church) activities. Living out the Christian faith at work is equated with sharing the gospel of personal salvation, or perhaps ensuring personal integrity and honesty in one’s business dealings, or perhaps starting a work Bible study meeting. None of this is bad per se, but it is an unfortunately truncated view that neglects the application of the lordship of Christ to 90% of the average Christian’s life.

Consequently, many Christians have not thought through a Christian view of (among other earthy subjects) politics. So it is, that we have Christians who view politics as dirty and unworthy of Christian interest, and simultaneously take for granted the default socialist statist approach to governance. Thus, the role of state has continued to grow and grow unchecked with little or no Christian opposition. This should not have been.

Education is a case in point. In New Zealand the 1877 education act was passed into law. It established ‘free’, compulsory and secular education for all Pakeha New Zealand children. Well-grounded and Biblical Christians should never have supported this legislation, but around the world acts like this were supported with very little outcry from Christian leaders. R.L. Dabney’s prescient opposition being one prominent exception. Little by little the state’s appetite for control has grown and expanded. As each successive generation passes away, a new generation grows up assuming the current approach to government is normal.

So it is, that we have a state that believes it is responsible for our children’s education, our health, our economic well-being, our housing, our media and the information we receive, our charity and so on, right down to managing our interpersonal actions to ensure we don’t offend each other. We are slowly but surely being enslaved. What we need is a Biblical worldview of government. And given the pandemic and government actions as a response to this, we had better figure out what we think and how we must act toward government quickly.

In posts that follow, we will explore some Biblical passages that will help us develop our thinking on government and its role.

Human Rights

What is the source of human rights? For the Christian, this answer is easy. Our rights come from our Creator. We are made in his image and thus imbued with the dignity that flows from this. Thus, we have the right not to be killed. Since we are made in the Creator’s image, and we have been made for dominion, we are able to work God’s earth and as analogies of the Creator, we can create value and worth from our mind and the materials of earth. Thus we have the right not to be stolen from. For the Christian, human rights stem from the imago Dei, and God’s law.

However, many no longer live with the truth as their worldview. They reject the living God and embrace a materialist worldview. They believe that man is the result of a long evolutionary process, and God is a creation of man. However, these individuals quite like the Christian concept of human rights. So they want to steal them from our worldview. Of course they can’t get them from their own, for where could rights come from in a chance evolutionary system – a system that by its very nature requires bloodshed and might as right for evolutionary progress to occur.

So how do they back up their rights? With their own ‘god’ of course. And who is that God? The state! I recently heard some womble on the radio talking about the right to adequate housing. So I looked into this concept and found the Human Rights Commission espouses the right to ‘adequate’ housing. In a brochure on this, they write:

The human right to adequate housing is binding legal obligation of the State of New Zealand. This means the State of New Zealand has agreed to ensure that the right to adequate housing is progressively realised in New Zealand. It is an “international obligation” that must be performed in New Zealand.

The State has a duty to protect the right of people in New Zealand to enjoy adequate housing and a responsibility to provide remedies.

While this sounds nice, and of course we want everyone to have nice housing, God has not given us a ‘right’ to adequate housing. Nor has he given the State the role of ensuring we have it. He has given us hands and feet, a mind and ingenuity. And he has called us to exercise dominion over the earth he made. Work is how we get houses. The State does not have the right to make rights. Only God has that right, because he alone is the sovereign Creator. The State can only recognise the rights he has given people in his Word. When they attempt to make new rights, they are usurping the throne of God.

Unfortunately, we live in an age where the people have turned from the God whose yoke is easy and burden light to Leviathan who we think will look after us and care for us. And so our god State has benificently given us a right to adequate housing.

But for every right, there must be a corresponding duty. For example, I have the right not to be killed or stolen from. That means you have the duty not to club me over the head with a blunt instrument to steal my wallet. What does it mean that we all have a right to adequate housing? It means others have a duty to ensure this human right is not thwarted. According to the UN, it is the State that has this duty. Yet the State does not create wealth. Unlike the one true God, it cannot make something out of nothing, so it must plunder its people. Which ultimately means we have a duty to pay for the adequate housing of others who do not have it.

Ultimately this means that we do not have a right to our own resources, because somebody who needs them has more of a right to them than us. So this ‘human right’ is the right of the hungry Leviathan to take money from unwilling people to provide for others who do not have ‘adequate‘ (and that term is defined very generously by the UN) housing. His yoke is hard and his burden is heavy. Turn from the idol of State and come to Christ the true king of the universe.

Jabba the State

It is not that everything has been politicized. Everything has been stolen from the polis and given over to Jabba the State – bloated, disgusting, corrupt, without conscience, accountable to no one, and voiding the results of his meals into the land and the drinking water and the air that everyone has to breathe.

We want our authority returned to us – or we intend to take it up again – because it is ours by right. We want not to be reduced to idiots and barbarians with a nominal and trivial vote. Our opponents here talk a great deal about diversity, which seems only to refer to the variously mottled patches of flesh over Jabba the State’s tumid paunch. We want a diversity that strikes terror into their hearts: the natural diversity you get when the school board of East Springfield hires and fires and orders books with a different plan in mind from that of the school board of West Springfield; or when the Christian baker conducts business by his best lights, and the Jewish baker by his; or when men congregate to do something more conducive to the common weal than watching a ball game and getting drunk; or when women organize a father-daughter dance and do not thereby mean a mother-daughter dance or anything else besides what the words obviously denote; or when the citizens of North Springfield begin their meetings with a prayer; or anything else, Jabba, that is not your business, or yours, Jabba’s creatures otherwise known as lawyers, college professors, social workers, and judges.

Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes

The Parlous State of Media in New Zealand

Recently in a short post entitled Department of Truth, we noted that more and more, the mainstream media seems to be transforming into a department of government: the Department of Propaganda Truth. Karl du Fresne has written an excellent article highlighting this, and in this post we will pick out some of the important points he makes.

He notes that of the $55 million ‘Public Interest Journalism Fund’ more than $2.4 million is being spent in the training and development and training of 25 cadet Maori, Pasifika and “diverse” journalists. As du Fresne points out, the “latter category will presumably include those who identify as transgender or non-binary and other aggrieved minorities that we haven’t got names for yet.” Then there is the ominous $300,000 given to Stuff to produce a cultural competency course which is promised to “to fundamentally shift representation in NZ media”

What benefit is there to the public in any of this? As du Fresne rightly points out, “our money will end up being spent on advocacy journalism.” In applying for this public money, “media organisations must commit to a set of requirements that include, among other things, actively promoting the Maori language and ‘the principles of Partnership, Participation and Protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi’“. Our mainstream media have been bought with our money like tacky whores with no principles. What is our answer to this? Stop consuming their products. Stop subscribing to them! Turn to other sources of news that are not being bought off by the government to be their propaganda wing.

Wasted Potential

Recently I read an article by Don Brash on benefit numbers. The numbers were shocking. As of June 2021, there were 354,744 receiving a main benefit from the government. This represents 11.3% of the working-age population. Part of this (2.1%) is made up of people receiving sole-parent support. A massive 6.1% are people receiving jobseeker support. These are people (supposedly) looking for work, or temporarily unable to work due to a health condition or injury. There are just over 190,000 or 6.1% of the working-age population in this category. As Brash rightly points out, this number has not reduced in any significant way despite the fact that employers are screaming out for even unskilled workers. He writes, “Clearly having more than a third of a million adults dependent on a benefit at a time when employers are desperate for staff shows that there is something fundamentally wrong.“

Brash goes on to make some interesting points, and I’d encourage you to read the full article. What I wanted to do was reflect very briefly on the way that the religion of Statism gets things wrong. Forcibly taking other people’s money and giving it to unproductive members of society might seem like a nice thing to do. After all, none of us wants another person to starve. Yet the problem is that in providing assistance like this, and then in the creation of perverse incentives not to work (like minimum wage laws), the State actually causes a percentage of the population to be unable or unwilling to work. This is not good for them, and it is not good for society. Once again we see that the mercies of the wicked are cruel. For a country to have a full 6.1% of people who could work not working is an incredible waste of a society’s potential. Furthermore, the encouragement of family breakup through rampant sexual immorality has led to more sole-parent (i.e. economically unviable) family structures that require government (read unwilling other people) to support.

Paul’s rule with the Thessalonians was “If a man will not work, he shall not eat.” It’s a good rule, and if charity was more personalised, it would force those who should be working to actually work to their own benefit, and the benefit of the community around them. God’s law is good and brings blessing to society. Statism pretends kindness but causes a spiral of societal degeneracy and destruction, which it then uses to argue for more of its ‘kindness’. Stop voting for it.

Department of Truth

Media is supposed to criticize and investigate the powers that be. They should be a counterweight to the power of a government. But in New Zealand, our media has become a wing of the government. It has become the Department of Propaganda Truth for the Government. The god of State needs its false prophets to teach the people the word of god. No doubt my readers have heard of the $55 million bribe Public Interest Journalism Fund. Here is an article on Stuff where they unashamedly announce that they will receive $591,465 for their “The Whole Truth project which is designed to counter misinformation where it occurs about Covid-19.” No doubt this information, bought and paid for by our taxes, will be used to support the government’s narrative on everything Covid. No doubt anything that doesn’t fit our government’s approach and views on this topic will ever see the light of day on Stuff. After all, he who pays the piper calls the tune.

Who Do They Belong To?

One of the idols of our age is the state. And education is very important to the state, particularly the leftist state which seeks to control and manipulate every area of life to achieve utopia. They need to produce compliant citizens who will follow their dictates mindlessly. Part of this of course is that much of what they say is arrant nonsense, and it takes a certain type of idiot to listen to them. For example, only someone bereft of sanity – an idiot – can sagely proclaim that a man with a few bits chopped off and given some hormone treatment is a woman. So you see, they believe they must control education, and education is not about developing critical thinking and intelligence as much as they try to tell you that. If it was, they would free it up to different views and approaches.

You don’t believe me? At teacher’s college, I wrote an essay suggesting that teacher registration was a waste of time, because it didn’t protect students, and it didn’t improve teacher standards. Moreover, I argued that independent schools should have the freedom to employ people who have not jumped through the ideological hoops required by registration since to attract students who pay fees when the government holds a monopoly of ‘free’ schools obviously forces those schools to provide a superior service. Predictably, my essay was not looked upon favourably. Written comments from more than one lecturer were recorded on the paper which I had never seen before. One comment in particular stuck with me. “We must have gatekeepers.” Yes, quite. The statists have to control who teaches your children. That is an assumed good.

So statists, and unfortunately most teachers are statists, do not believe that parents are responsible for the education and training of their children. Setting themselves against Christ, they believe that children must be rendered unto Caesar and his bureaucratic minions. They arrogate to themselves what belongs to parents. In New Zealand, we see this in their monopolistic control of education generally, and in their zoning rules (and a host of other rules) specifically. We also see it in the way teachers think they have the right to teach values contrary to the wishes of parents.

Indeed, this evil has saturated the Western world. A couple of recent examples are in order. In Loudoun County, Virginia, the district educational leaders have proposed policies requiring teachers to use a child’s preferred gender pronouns. At a public meeting on this issue, parents were so opposed to this, that the board closed public comments at the meeting, and the police declared an unlawful assembly. Two parents were apparently arrested for refusing to leave the meeting. There is nothing so frustrating to these control freaks than to have parents arrogantly assume they have a say in what their children are being taught.

In other parts of the US, teachers, are complaining about the crackdown by conservatives on critical race theory being taught in schools. Here’s one example of the kind of ill-educated brainwashing robots government schools tend to attract.

So what should you do? Get your children out of government schools. Seriously. What are you waiting for? Do not render to Caesar what belongs to God. Give your children an actual education. “Free compulsory education” gets a one out of three. Yes, there is compulsion. It’s not free and it’s not education. It costs the souls of our children and stifles their ability to think and challenge the idolatrous State.

The Necessity of Patriarchy

We train boys to be men. If you believe that the Church, the nation, and what is left of Western culture and civilization can be revived or rebuilt without the leadership of men, I suggest that you take an honest look at what happens when men retreat from the public square. You do not get rule by women. You get anarchy – social chaos that requires the vast machinery of state control to manage, control that enters into a host-parasite relationship with the chaos itself, much to the destruction of true liberty and the flourishing of communities…

If you do not raise men to be fathers – not just progenitors of children, but fathers in the full sense implied by a phrase like “city fathers” – they will not therefore become compliant and gentle mothers. They will either drag out their days in ennui and desperation or go very bad, very fast. Nor will they lack for women, and plenty of them too, who will be attracted to the dangerous man, the rebel, the leader of the gang. The alternative to rule by fathers, which is what patriarchy means, is male domination in the form of a police state or in the persons of men outside the law.

ANTHONY ESOLEN FROM “OUT OF THE ASHES”

Cruel Mercies

It’s a funny thing. Those of a more godless statist bent tend to like to paint those who disagree with their methods as uncaring. But the truth is, we are actually caring, it’s just that our care is more thought out. We tend to be sceptical of state solutions because…well when have they ever improved a situation before?

A classic case is all the hand-wringing about child poverty. Leaving aside the definitional problems of child-poverty, what is one of the largest causes of child-poverty? Sole-parent families are a huge contributing factor to child-poverty. Lindsay Mitchell, a researcher into welfare in New Zealand recently authored a report which found that although single parent families make up 28 percent of all families with dependent children, they are the poorest families in NZ. Indeed, 51% of children in poverty live in single parent families, and these parents have the lowest home ownership rates and highest debt ratios. But do we see our leaders point out the truth that men and women who decide to have children together ought to stay together for the welfare of their children? Do we see government initiatives to support and strengthen two-parent families? Do we see an acknowledgement that this is the best way to bring children up? Of course not, that wouldn’t be…kind. So instead our leaders encourage behaviour that leads to more and more children being born into poverty and therefore we increase income inequality and hinder the life prospects of a large proportion of our population.

Truly, the mercy of the wicked is cruel.