Not everything is up for a vote

"Who died and left you king?" goes the old challenge to ideas others think are being pushed a little too hard. After 200 years of experimenting with representative government, America seems to think everything is subject to majority vote.

But don't some issues transcend changes in social taste? We look back in history and correctly say slavery was wrong. But didn't a majority of Americans support it at some point in our history? On what basis, then, do we condemn such a past practice? On what foundation do we justify our actions today?

If there are transcendent principles, they must flow from a transcendent authority. Otherwise, they are meaningless. The full ramifications of this are hard for many to accept, because it means there is a power to which we owe duty, whether we choose to fulfill the obligation or not. We are used to being wary of earthly authority, and rightfully so. That wariness, however, has translated into general rebelliousness. Not necessarily a bad thing for keeping fallen human government in check... but a dangerous tendency in the presence of the ultimate authority. Joe Carter summarizes the dilemma well:

“Jesus is not a Republican or a Democrat,” said John Mark Reynolds, “He’s probably a monarchist.” When I first heard that at GodBlogCon I thought it was clever; now I find it to be a profound insight. Jesus constantly talked about the Kingdom of Heaven. So why do so few Christians talk about it? One reason, I believe, is that we are now all republicans and democrats (small-R, small-D) and simply don’t understand what Jesus is talking about. We may use the term “Lord” and “King of Kings” but—unlike the vast majority of people throughout history--we do not comprehend what it means to live under the reign of a king. We need some remedial training on how to live as subjects in a kingdom. We may be justified in rejecting the divine right of kings to rule but we cannot be justified if we reject the rule of our divine king.

Our Republic was assumed to be workable because every American would be free to vote to hold their representatives accountable to a standard larger than any of us--a standard imperfectly realized but commonly understood in 1776. Not so much today. Now, "everyone does what is right in his own eyes." That didn't work out too well for Israel three millenia ago, and it's not likely to work out well for us, either.