Rulers

Niccolò Machiavelli was a Renaissance era philosopher, politician, and writer. His writings greatly influenced modern political science. The following is an edited excerpt from The School of Life’s YouTube video on his views.

Machiavelli believed that to be effective, political leaders needed to be ruthless and tyrannical, not empathetic and just. His book, The Prince, is a short manual of advice for princes on how not to finish last. And the answer was never to be overly devoted to acting nicely. and to know how to borrow every single trick employed by the most dastardly, unscrupulous and nastiest people who have ever lived.

Machiavelli knew where our counter-productive obsession with acting nicely originated from: the West was brought up on the Christian story of Jesus of Nazareth. (He was) the very nice man from Galilee who always treated people well.

But Machiavelli pointed out an inconvenient detail to this sentimental tale of the triumph of goodness through meekness. From a practical perspective, Jesus’ life was an outright disaster. This gentle soul was trampled upon and humiliated, disregarded and mocked. Judged in his lifetime and outside of any divine assistance, he was one of history’s greatest losers.

Possible Preaching Angle:

What Machiavelli (and so many others) fail to take into account is that the gentle Lamb becomes a Lion. After the seeming “defeat” of the Cross, our resurrected Lord will return in great power and glory to reign over the earth. He was exalted by the Father because of his willingness to humble himself and take on the form of a servant.

"The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state and never its tool."

Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

Our age finds it difficult to come to grips with figures like Winston Churchill. The political leaders with whom we are familiar generally aspire to be superstars rather than heroes. The distinction is crucial. Superstars strive for approbation; heroes walk alone. Superstars crave consensus; heroes define themselves by the judgment of a future they see it as their task to bring about. Superstars seek success in a technique for eliciting support; heroes pursue success as the outgrowth of inner values.

The modern political leader rarely ventures to comment in public without having tested his views on focus groups, if indeed he does not derive them from a focus group. To a man like Churchill, the very concept of focus groups would have been unimaginable. Thus in the space of a generation, Churchill, the quintessential hero, has been transformed from the mythic to the nearly incomprehensible.

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny; they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

The great need for anyone in authority is courage.

There is nothing quite like a presidential election year to reveal how empty and dissatisfying our political process has become. ... Television has taken over the role in choosing candidates that party bosses once played, but that can hardly be called reform.

Sufyan Thauri, a classical Muslim writer, once wrote, "The best of the rulers is he who keeps company with men of [religious] learning, and the worst of the learned men is he who keeps the society of the king." That is to say, religion and worldly affairs prosper together when political rules are qualified by moral principles, and they suffer when moral principles are qualified by political expedience.

Candace was a queen of Ethiopia, the one mentioned in (Acts 8:27) in the story of Philip witnessing to an Ethiopian eunuch who was this queen's treasurer. Tradition tells us that Queen Candace was converted to Christ through the eunuch's testimony, and that her conversion caused her to use her office to promote Christianity in Ethiopia and the surrounding countries. She and her husband reigned c. 25-41 A.D.

Today, "freedom" seems to mean the right to abort one's child or to censor certain lofty ideas from the public schools while tolerating the filthiest of pornography as First Amendment-protected speech and press. Conviction in political leaders is seen as "extremism." It is thought better to consult the polls to arrive at a bottom-line consensus than to posit firm standards of right and wrong and challenge the nation to follow.

Religious liberty consists of the civil magistrate's comprehending and acknowledging that it has no rightful authority over a man's soul. A proper understanding of religious liberty requires the civil authority to understand that a man's religious beliefs are beyond the purview of the state. Consequently, the state authority does not merely tolerate religious beliefs and activity, nor can it grant the right of religious freedom. All that the state can do legitimately is to acknowledge man's inherent God-given right to worship God in his own way, as well as the right not to worship at all.

One of the great Baptist gifts to the Reformation Heritage is a full awareness that for individual believer priests (1 Peter 2:5), (1 Peter 2:9) ) to "work out" their "own salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12) they must be unhindered by governmental interference.

Early in the seventeenth century the great English Baptist, Thomas Helwys, penned the first published plea in the English language for religious liberty in his A Short Declaration of the Mistery of Iniquity when he declared in 1612 that the King of England was a mere man and had no authority over men's souls "for men's religion to God is betwixt God and themselves."

In New England, Roger Williams took up the plea for religious liberty which led to the establishment of a colony, Providence Plantations (later Rhode Island), where men enjoyed complete religious liberty. The Baptist concept of religious liberty was buttressed and fortified by a deep-seated belief in the New Testament, with its lack of church-state entanglement, rather than the Old Testament, as the manual for faith and practice in the New Covenant of Christ and His Church.

The commitment to religious liberty and the consequent belief in the separation of church and state need not, however, imply that religious views should not inform political issues. Religious liberty requires an absolute separation of the institutions of the church and the state. However, the biblical dictums concerning the Christian's obligation to support civil magistry (Luke 20:25): (Romans 13:1-7) guarantee the absolute inseparability of religious values and political issues. The Christian not only has the right, but also the duty to bring his or her religious convictions to bear upon the political issues of the day. Religious liberty means freedom for religion, not freedom from exposure to religious activities. To argue that a person's views are disqualified from the political and social arena because they are based on religious convictions is not state neutrality, but government censorship.

The great agony of the Christian statesman turns on the proper use of great power for moral ends.

General Eisenhower used to demonstrate the art of leadership with a simple piece of string. He'd put it on a table and say: "Pull it and it'll follow wherever you wish. Push it and it will go nowhere at all."

Our reliance is in love of liberty which God has planted in us. Our defense is in the spirit which primed liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your door. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.

Nero, a man with light blue eyes, thick neck, protruding stomach, and spindly legs, was a crazed and cruel emperor, a pleasure-driven man who ruled the world by whim and fear. It just goes to show the difference an upbringing makes.

His mother, the plotting Agrippina, managed to convince her husband, Claudius, to adopt her son Nero and put him, ahead of Claudius' own son, first in line for the throne. Maternal concern not satisfied, she then murdered Claudius, and Nero ruled the world at age 17.

The young Nero, having been tutored by the servile philosopher and pedophile Seneca, was actually repulsed by the death penalty. But he resourcefully turned this weakness into strength: he eventually had his mother stabbed to death for treason and his wife Octavia beheaded for adultery. (He then had Octavia's head displayed for his mistress, Poppaea, whom years later he kicked to death when she was pregnant ) The Senate made thank offerings to the gods for this restoration of public morality. Unfortunately, that is but the tip of the bloody and treacherous iceberg of Nero's reign. Yet such activities overshadow the few constructive things he attempted, albeit without success: the abolition of indirect taxes (to help farmers), the building of a Corinthian canal, and the resettlement of people who had lost their homes in the Great Fire of Rome in 64.

Nero tried to pin the blame for that fire on the city's small Christian community (regarded as a distinct, dissident group of Jews), and so, appropriately, he burned many of them alive. Peter and Paul were said to have been martyred as a result. But the rumors persisted that Nero had sung his own poem "The Sack of Troy" (he did not "fiddle") while enjoying the bright spectacle he had ignited. That business about singing was not unreasonable, for Nero had for years made a fool of himself by publicly playing the lyre and singing before, literally, command performances.

Political turmoil finally forced the troubled emperor to commit suicide. His last words were, "What a showman the world is losing in me!"

The historian Pliny called Domitian the beast from hell who sat in its den, licking blood. In the Book of Revelation, John of the Apocalypse may have referred to Domitian when he described a beast from the abyss who blasphemes heaven and drinks the blood of the saints.

Domitian repelled invasions from Dacia (modern-day Rumania), something later emperors would have increasing difficulty doing. He also was a master builder and adroit administrator, one of the best who ever governed the Empire. Suetonius, who hated Domitian, had to admit that "he took such care to exercise restraint over the city officials and provincial governors that at no time were these more honest or just."

But there was something wrong with Domitian. He enjoyed catching flies and stabbing them with a pen. He liked to watch gladiatorial fights between women and dwarfs. And during his reign he was so suspicious of plots against his life, the number of imperial spies and informers proliferated, as did the number of casualties among suspect Roman officials.

Domitian was the first emperor to have himself officially titled in Rome as "God the Lord." He insisted that other people hail his greatness with acclamations like "Lord of the earth," "Invincible," "Glory," "Holy," and "Thou Alone."

When he ordered people to give him divine honors, Jews, and no doubt Christians, balked. The resulting persecution of Jews is well-documented; that of Christians is not. However, the beast that the author of Revelation describes, as well as the events in the book, are perhaps best interpreted as hidden allusions to the rule of Domitian. In addition, Flavius Clemens, consul in 95, and his wife, Flavia Domitilla, were executed and exiled, respectively, by Domitian's orders; many historians suspect this was because they were Christians.

But what goes around, comes around. An ex-slave of Clemens, Stephanus, was mobilized by some of Domitian's enemies and murdered him.

It was on Christmas Eve, after a Romanian church had gathered for candlelight service, that the Communist soldiers came to take the pastor. The people lined up outside the church--10, 15, 20, 30 deep--encircling the church and saying, "If you come after the pastor, you come after us first." The soldiers couldn't get in. They couldn't move them. The candle lights began to move through the cities. As those candles began to spread, others came out into the street, and courage came. On Christmas Day the people said, "We've had enough of this," and the terrible dictator of Romania, the despot and his wife, were executed on Christmas day, 1989.

President John Adams, before he joined his wife Abigail at their new official residence in Washington, D.C., sent her a prayer, which more than a hundred years later President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered inscribed over the fireplace in the State Dining Room: "I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and on all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof."