The Right to Resist
Born at Cape Cod and educated at Harvard, the Reverend Samuel West was a patriot. But above all, he was a devoted servant of God who sought to live in accordance with God’s Word. That the American colonies were on the right side of an imperial crisis destined to split the mighty British Empire, he did not doubt.
But others, especially church-going New Englanders, raised a question that Christian thinkers had wrestled with, and with great difficulty, for centuries: is it lawful to resist government authority, even when that authority is against the common good?
After all, they asked how else one should interpret the words of the Apostle Paul in Romans 13. “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God,” Paul had taught. “Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.” It seemed for centuries as though it was pointless to interpret those words in any way that did not affirm absolute submission to rulers, even when they were despotic.
In medieval Christendom, thinkers routinely defended the absolutist interpretation, though a shift toward a right to resist did occur. Augustine, for one, held that kings could be resisted when they acted against God, but only passively and never with force.
Thomas Aquinas, however, blessed the deposition of tyrants by force because their tyranny forfeited whatever legitimacy they once had. Aquinas’s view was a middle ground between the staunch passivity of Augustine and the tyrannicide advocated by classical thinkers like Cicero.
Throughout the medieval era, the absolutist interpretation remained the dominant position, invoked by kings and the papacy alike. But the Reformation changed that. Not only had the pompous institutional absolutism of the Catholic Church been denied and priestly intercession rejected, but the reformed tradition of Martin Luther and John Calvin took Aquinas’s view of political resistance to a near-Lockean point.
When the Protestant princes of the Holy Roman Empire faced the determined opposition of Catholic Emperor Charles V, Luther drifted away from the orthodox reading of Romans 13. He argued that the emperor, acting unjustly, forfeited his royal prerogatives and became just another private person whose injustice could be lawfully resisted. Calvin’s position was similar, though less clear.
The Scot Samuel Rutherford took the reformed right of resistance further, echoing the future Enlightenment tradition. Since a man cannot take away his liberty without his consent, so, too, can he not give away his liberty to a despotic prince without his consent. Power is from God, Rutherford held, but not tyranny. To not resist tyranny is not to follow God. Thus, within six centuries, the orthodox, absolutist interpretation had been severely weakened.
And so, Samuel West, educated in the reformed tradition, stood behind a Boston pulpit on May 29, 1776, to defend “the right to rebel against governors.” First, West preached, one needn’t look to the Bible to understand that men like Augustine had been wrong – “The doctrine of non-resistance and unlimited passive obedience to the worst of tyrants could never have found credit among mankind had the voice of reason been hearkened to for a guide because such a doctrine would immediately have been discerned to be contrary to natural law.”
Second, and most important, West argued that the orthodox reading of Romans 13 was wrong from the start. Paul’s rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. They exist “to thee for good.” Thus, West argued that it is the institution of government that God ordains, and only for good; tyrants are usurpers of God’s design. What is evil cannot also be good; the tyrant is not of God and must be resisted. “Unlimited submission and obedience is due to none but God alone,” West said in a reformist tone.
The Augustinian argument of passivity was “self-contradictory and absurd,” West said, for it assumes that while God “commands us to pursue virtue and the general good, he does at the same time require us to persecute virtue, and betray the general good, by enjoining [our] obedience to the wicked commands of tyrannical oppressors.”
Following Luther, West said, “the authority of a tyrant is of itself null and void.” Nero, “as he was a tyrant, could not be a minister of God, [nor] have a right to claim submission from the people.”
West concluded that Paul’s words were thankfully “rescued from the absurd interpretations which the favorers of arbitrary government have put upon it” and are instead “a noble confirmation of that free and generous plan of government which the law of nature and reason points out to us.”
A few weeks later, the Declaration of Independence was signed and published. Government exists to secure natural rights, it read. When a government “becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government.” By the late 18th century, the new orthodoxy was to proclaim that “rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”
And few were as devoted to the new orthodoxy as Samuel West, who readily joined the Continental Army. “Let us treat our rulers with all that honor and respect which the dignity of their station requires,” he told Bostonians. “But let it be such an honor and respect as is worthy of the sons of freedom to give.”