Romans 13 Is God’s Word And “Abolish The Police” Is Not

By Dr. R. Scott Clark - Posted at The Heidelblog:

From 1980, when I first came into contact with Reformed theology, I also came into contact with theonomists. As a naïve evangelical I took Romans 13 to God’s Word and as part of the New Testament authoritative for believers in a way that the Mosaic ceremonial and civil laws were no longer. The theonomists with whom I talked, however, regularly dismissed Romans 13 almost as if it was not to be regarded as canonical. They did so because it was almost impossible to reconcile it with their view of the civil magistrate and the theory of the abiding validity of the Mosaic civil laws in exhaustive detail. Some of those theonomists were also Libertarians; it was from the theonomists that I first learned about Ron Paul. On the latter’s connections to the Christian Reconstruction movement see Michael J. McVicar, Christian Reconstruction: R. J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

More recently, overt resistance to Romans 13 seems to be coming from what has come to be called the “social justice movement” among left-leaning evangelicals one of whom recently declared on social media, “abolish the police.” Such sentiment is flatly contrary to the Word of God and certainly as contrary to the Reformed confession of the Scriptures. That such rhetoric is being mooted by ostensibly Reformed folk reveals how profoundly some have become alienated from even the most rudimentary knowledge of Scripture.

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