Episode 338: Beza, Acton and CPAC

See full Blog Description at: https://bit.ly/3sFVdbFShow more

This week is a journey through time from Beza, Acton and CPAC. I was down hard last week with a sinus infection but CPAC was a great distraction between sneezes, snot and sleep. Since most of you have no idea who Beza is you may think the infection caused some sort of delirium. While Acton is not a household name either except for his quote about 'doing nothing.'

Theodore Beza
Just a note on who Beza was and then I want you to take in the two references that I am using for this program. For a more complete simple biography I suggest you follow the link on Monergism concerning Beza. Here is an excerpt:

‘Beza, He succeeded to the high position which Calvin had long held, not only in Geneva, but in the Protestant world; and was, for a period of above forty years after Calvin’s death, the most prominent and influential theologian in the Reformed, as distinguished from the Lutheran, church…

He exerted great influence for a very long period in most of the Reformed churches, and in none more than in that of Scotland. He advised and encouraged our own great Reformer, John Knox, in the whole course of his arduous struggle with the Church of Home,..’

This long dissertation on Beza ultimately discusses the great influence he had in regard to all that was occurring culturally, politically and ecclesiastically during the Reformation. All in all, he and others set the tone for the Christian Resistance to tyrants.

My focus for this weeks program is the first question in Beza's 1574 work 'On The Rights Of The Magistrate.' Simply put for this introduction, If the elected representatives and especially the bureaucrats aren't God, well, they thinking and believing themselves to be doesn't make them correct and therefore, they most likely are creating policy, law and rules that are contrary to the God of the Bible. If that is so they are tyrants and despots. Do you obey them ? or ... NOT.