Quote:
Originally Posted by Confessor 
Actually, suddenly, I think I may have the general principle down, but please correct me if I am wrong: citizens must disobey any magistrates if and only if they are ordered to sin. Lesser magistrates must disobey any greater magistrates if and only if the greater magistrates are themselves unduly wicked. (This wickedness may be hard to demarcate, but the principle is still there.) Does that sound good?
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That is what I have always believed myself. Also, a point that has not been mentioned is the political context where St. Paul was coming from. There were no Christian magistrates in the Roman empire; Christians were entirely under the control of heathens, both in the form of lesser and higher magistrates. Christians were also very much the minority and thus it was the early church's duty not to become some confrontational political force but rather a converting force to the thousands upon thousands who had no idea about the tenets of Christianity, much less the persecutions that the Church was suffering. A modern day example would be an evangelist sent to witness in Iraq -- it would be perfectly within his rights to preach to anyone he wanted to, but to become a political opponent of the regime? That would send the wrong message to his hearers -- a message suggesting that Christianity is less a spiritual force and more a political instrument of revolution. Such an attitude would have been fatal to the early Church and would have associated it in Roman minds with zealous Messianic Jewish terrorist cults bent on overthrowing Roman rule. It was absolutely essential that Christianity remain as apolitical as possible for the message to be heard -- something that St. Paul understood very well. St. Peter made this motivation clear as well in 1 Peter 2:15 when, after telling the Church to remain subject to "all manner ordinance of man," he said, "For so is the will of God, that by well doing ye may put to silence the ignorance of the foolish men."
For both the English Revolution and the American Revolution, however, the context is very different and much more similar to Old Testament conflicts within the Jewish government. All the magistrates involved were at least nominally Christian (or adhered to Christianity's ethical system for the most part) and thus it was within their right to act in their capacities as magistrates to act against the higher power of the King in order to fulfill their sworn duties to the populace whom they held power over to rule and protect. Otherwise, what point would there be in having lesser magistrates? The Founding Fathers were faced with the ugly prospect of having to allow King George to send soldiers into Boston households, possibly to rape and plunder innocent townsfolk in the process of financially oppressing them, whilst King Charles' Parliament was faced with the even more hideous prospect of sending aggressive forces to Scotland in order to brutally subject their fellow Scottish Puritans to a tyrannical prelacy and to stand by whilst Archbishop Laud and his Star Chamber continued to cut pamphleteers' ears off and flog religious dissenters. If, as St. Paul says in Romans 13:1-2, the powers that be are ordained by God, then in Heaven's name what else could He expect the magistrates that He has ordained to do but to protect those whom He has given them to rule over?