Political Sermons From The Past: Unlimited Submission And Non-Resistance To The Higher Powers By Jonathan Mayhew

 By Pastor David Hall - Posted at The Heidelblog:

Introduction

Colonial thinkers Samuel Adams and Rev. Jonathan Mayhew argued against the innate goodness of man with implicit reference to King George III: “Ambition and lust for power,” they claimed, “are predominant passions in the breasts of most men. . . . Power is of a grasping, encroaching nature . . . [It] aims at extending itself and operating according to mere will, whenever it meets with no balance, check, constraint, or opposition of any kind.”1 That conclusion seemed more and more obvious to many American colonists.

Notwithstanding, that had not always been the case. The theological consensus prior to the mid-sixteenth century was that since God had ordained governors (per Rom 13:1–4), not only was it wrong to rebel against them, but evil rulers were also sent by God’s providential chastisement to call a people to repent of their sins. Resistance to the government was seen as harmful. William Tyndale, for example, also exhibited the received Christian understanding when he suggested that a civil ruler is accountable only to God (and never to man). In the pre-Reformation consensus, to resist the king was to resist God. A person who raised his hand against the king raised his hand against God. Should a wicked king sin, it was entrusted to the wrath and vengeance of God to bring corrective judgement. By 1750, however, that view was roundly challenged.

On January 30, 1750, twenty-nine-year-old Jonathan Mayhew (1720–66), a Unitarian-leaning minister of Boston’s West Church, preached a sermon entitled “Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers.” This sermon set out to interpret Romans 13 correctly, while reflecting on the anniversary of the death of King Charles I (then nostalgically memorialized by some) a century earlier. Although Mayhew was a minister who paddled against the Calvinistic currents of his day, his views still resonated with Geneva’s distinct political tones. This influential sermon has been called the morning gun of the Revolution,2 and could have been preached by a French Huguenot resister.3 Mayhew, a 1744 Harvard graduate, was considered by many to be the leading preacher in his day. Mayhew believed it a matter of mere Christian duty for believers to be aware of what “their religion teaches concerning that subjection which they owe to the higher powers.”4

Continue here.