darrellmaurina
Puritan Board Freshman
Randy:
When Darrell says this church work frequently must be done by "laymen", I believe he means "ordained lay elders", in distinction from unordained laymen in the church.
You're basically correct, Elder Van Der Molen, in understanding what I meant -- I have a long history of defending the importance of respect for office.
That principle applies beyond the church world and I think I need to say a bit more than I did in my prior post to Martin Snyder.
I don't have to like President Obama, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, or Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, but according to Romans 13, I do have to respect their offices, and in a free nation like ours, my rights and responsibilities as a citizen include respecting their offices enough to remove them from office via peaceful means, namely, using my vote and my free speech rights.
This has important practical applications to modern politics.
While I like many things about the "Tea Party" movement, I cannot affirm the anti-authority attitudes which are growing in popularity in conservative circles. I am seriously concerned that if conservatives start using an approach to political activism modeled on Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals," that essentially anti-Christian view of government has its own logic and will take us into places we do not want to go.
There are reasons why Abraham Kuyper's political party was called the "Anti-Revolutionary Party." We are conservatives. We are not revolutionaries. There is a difference, and a conservative version of French Revolutionary ideals and methods is just as contrary to Scripture as the French Revolution itself.
In politics, we need to get to 50 percent to win. That means we need to take allies where we can get them, including people with whom we may have important disagreements. But let's not forget that if we don't follow God's methods, we cannot expect God's blessings.