My Time In The Rebellion

“My Time In The Rebellion” was a short story I wrote some years ago in a series of stories called Secfenia Dark, based on a role-playing game my best friend and I started in the mid-1990’s that dealt with the fortunes of a small border province that had become a nation after it rebelled from a corrupt and decaying empire ruled by meglomaniacs. The story follows the perspective of a certain Natonito Albright, Directrix (second-in-charge) of the Empire of Secfenia, as he entertains some guests at a favorite restaurant of his in his hometown of Bravia just before the shotgun wedding of his foster daughter (and the orphaned younger sister of his wife) and his nephew, by whom she had gotten pregnant. Most of the story consists of flashbacks as to how a young Senator from the backwater province of Secfenia had helped lead a rebellion and then forced the surrender of the army which had been sent out to punish the rebellion. Crucial to the story, and to the series of stories that I wrote about this particular fictional kingdom, is the concern with the legitimacy of government, dealing with the consequences of sin and the need for redemption, the responsibilities, moral and otherwise, placed on leaders, and the ambition of brave and stubborn people to rise above the status of their birth and the misfortunes of their childhood and fulfill the destiny to which God put them on this earth. These weighty concerns have as well been among the chief and consistent concerns of my own life.

A Young Rebel In Training

The concern with the legitimacy of government in all forms was a habit learned forcibly and often during my childhood. The abuse of power, either through direct action by those authority figures, or through the neglect of teachers, pastors, and other authority figures in my childhood to protect the innocent from the harassment and bullying of peers was a frequent occurrence during my entire childhood beginning in the first year of my life and continuing without abatement through high school. The divorce of my parents, with the division that brings to a family, also gave me early lessons in doubting the legitimacy of the governments over me. My father, on the one hand, was a consistent proponent of one-man rule, a firm believer in the necessity of centralized power to thwart the chaos that threatened him, though he felt uncomfortable with being that one man in rule. My mother, on the other hand, encouraged the questioning of authority and unacceptable nature of the answer “because I said so” when unsupported by reason. Between these conceptions I grew up, in tension between a proclivity to abhor disorder, proclaim and strive aid the abiding rule of God’s law in all aspects of this world, including my own actions, and long for a stability and security that has long eluded my grasp, and an independence of thought and action that has long irked whatever people have been in charge over me and has at times crossed over from prickly independence into actual rebellion.

Some examples should suffice for this tendency of mine throughout my life, and they do not appear only in my writing (although much of this rebellion has taken place through the written word, either through manifestos or blogs or my fictional writings). I have always delighted in correcting the errors of teachers and presenters, a habit I have tried in recent years to restrain in public so as to avoid attacking the credibility of the speaker (which is not my intention, at least not now). The first time I remember this habit being of difficulty is in the fourth grade, where my teacher, Mrs. King, erroneously proclaimed that Ottowa, Canada, was in the Canadian province of Quebec. Knowing better, as my maternal grandmother was born in Ontario, I corrected the teacher in front of the class. I can even remember this habit being evident as a student in the Ambassador Bible Center where a certain minister gave a presentation on Generations which I was in agreement with, and an area of my own where I have read deeply and written upon, but where I corrected a few typographical errors of his in front of the class, and then compounded my error some months later when he gave a slightly different version of his presentation at my congregation and I corrected him again on some errors that remained. Needless to say, despite the fact that I agree with what he says, he has plenty of reason not to be particularly fond of me.

This sort of attack on credibility of those in positions of leadership was not limited merely to implicit attacks based on their errors, but was sometimes much more direct and therefore hostile. My career in the politics of outright rebellion began, not surprisingly, in high school. As a sixteen year old high school student I, with some help from a slightly younger classmate, wrote an anonymous manifesto called the “IB Exception” where I protested that the failure of the high school administration to adequately provide books and classroom buildings to its best and brightest students made their administration illegitimate and unable to enforce stricter rules on student behavior, and that those students that brought money and honor to the school should be accordingly exempt from any such restrictive rules. Now, it should be noted that the two aspects of my personality normally in tension were here united to dangerous purpose. Most of my classmates in high school just disobeyed the rules, ignoring them altogether. However, given my nature, I could not simply ignore the rules and disobey them out of willful ignorance. Rather, the various twists and turns of my nature forced me to face what I took as illegitimate and tyrannical rule publicly and to justify my opposition to it by pointing out the failures of that leadership to adequately handle its obligations to me and to others. This need for justification and explanation, and my chronic inability to be quiet in the face of what I find to be unacceptable, cast me as a public revolutionary and as a rebel against authority.

Justification Denied

The desire to justify led naturally into a search of what the Bible said about authority, with the specific intent of finding out if and how the Bible dealt with the subject of how people are to respond to abuses by authority, and whether the failure of leaders to perform their God-ordained duties absolved their subjects of obedience to and respect of them. I did not find that anywhere in the scriptures, not even in those passages like Amos 7 or Deuteronomy 14 or 1 Kings 12 or 1 Samuel 8 that are the harshest towards the abuse of power. Of course, I did not find either a belief that leaders could do what they wanted without accountability, or that people had to obey whatever their leaders told them, but rather I saw that respect for office and the pointed criticism of the moral flaws of leadership, as well as an obedience to laws that did not contradict God’s laws, were all biblical requirements. While tyrants find little comfort in the prospect of eternal judgment or in what happened to Nebuchadnezzar or the Pharaoh, rebels find little comfort in the Bible, given that rebellion is universally condemned in scripture in the harshest of terms. God is not a God of rebellion, but rather a God of resistance to evil while respecting authority. In fact, it may be said that all sin is in fact rebellion of God’s sovereign authority and His unique position of defining right and wrong.

While my initial goal of finding a justification of rebellion was thus frustrated spectacularly, it was a useful lesson nonetheless. Thanks be to God that my desire to understand obey His word surpassed by desire to justify rebellion. In the process, in the course of much reading and writing, I learned a lot about the way in which the Bible handles situations that fall short of God’s ideal, including slavery and the abuse of power and so on. For one, the Bible seeks a model of gradual change based on conversion and then progressive sanctification in all aspects of life, both on an individual and a societal level. Christians are not to be threats to good government because to be a follower of God is to be obedient to His laws and to respect authorities, for even pointing out the flaws of our leaders is to be done so that they may repent of their sins and become converted to the truth, rather than to condemn them. Even criticism, therefore, demonstrates true loyalty, because we are loyal to their eternal best interests rather than enabling them to sin without knowledge of the result of their actions. So, my studies of how the Bible deals with such things may not have made me less irritating to those in charge, or less questioning, but it changed the motive of the actions—to serve to the glory of God rather than justifying my own rebellious will.

In examining the proper role of such criticism, I came to realize that the purpose of our actions is to build up godly institutions, rather than merely to criticize and tear down what is imperfect, and what is imperfect is both within us and all around us, since our own lives and everything in this world reflects the impact of our fallen state. Therefore, even more so than to critique, my interests changed into seeking to help build up these godly institutions. Having had rather negative experiences with my own family, I saw that I had the responsibility to break cycles that have lasted for generations in my family, to provide a legacy and a tradition of love and obedience rather than continue along paths that only led to misery and destruction. Having seen the results of corrupt institutions in churches and businesses and schools, I saw that I had to do what I could to help reform and replace where I had influence, either through my actions or through my support of others engaged in such work. Rather than being content to criticize the flawed legacy left to me by my forefathers, I had the responsibility to preserve the best of what it held (and indeed there was much I found was good about it) and to improve it so that I may bequeath it to others in a better state than I found it.

If it is a burden that I thus far bear alone, I hope that may not always be the case. Last October, I had the chance to visit Mendoza, Argentina, and some conversations I had with a young man helped me see an ideal of respecting authority that I realized was sorely lacking in my own experience. Very recently, in another conversation, a friend of mine wished to talk with the same minister of whom my other friend had spoken to give him and his wife the news of her relationship with another friend of mine before informing the general public, because she saw them as her parents, having lived with them and being introduced to the truth while living with them. I realized, with some regret, that I had never felt that close to most of my pastors, and have pondered often on what may be done about that situation. How do we rebuild the waste places, and turn the smoldering ruins of the past into a glorious new city, like Nehemiah did in Jerusalem some 2450 years ago?

The Reason For It All

I have some ideas of how this may be done, in part, but to be quite honest, I am concerned that given my (not entirely undeserved) reputation as a rebellious troublemaker that the ideas I have will be viewed unfavorably because they come from me. I see institutions, like the family and church, that are in dire need of some structural repairs, but wonder if my own actions and experiences have made me permanently unqualified to offer some assistance in the necessary and urgent repair work. To give but one brief example, in reading on and pondering the issue of congregational discipline, I have thought that having what amounted to a judicial system within congregations with various appeals courts going up to a final appeals court within a denomination with records kept of the evidence and testimony involved with the decisions made by one church accepted by other organizations that judge according to the same biblical standard might reduce the problem of church shopping by members. In addition, I have thought that where sanctions are given to members, that there should be the following sorts of elements present: what is the specific sin the member is guilty of (with biblical citations), what is the punishment, and what sort of action would be required in order to restore the member to a position of being in good standing in the congregation again. Too often this last element is missing, even if it may be implicit in what is decided. I know in my own life there is an example where this last element seems completely missing. I know I myself have been sanctioned for offenses including the publishing of very nasty allegations towards people (that, to be honest, I see no credible evidence of or reason for anyone to believe, though at the time I thought it acceptable to comment that the allegations had at least be made, something that in a later light I see as unwise and unnecessary), but these sanctions were open-ended, and still exist, and I honestly have no idea what I could have done or could still do at this point to end those sanctions. In other examples I have seen, an unbaptized member living with a non-member has been disfellowshipped, but there was no mention made that either marriage or ceasing to live with the other person would end the disfellowshipment. This led to embitterment, when the real purpose of Christian discipline is to restore people to good graces and lead to repentance and obedience, not to condemn them to damnation and embitterment against God and the Church. Too often this point is not made sufficiently clear when ministers hand out punishments, and it is a serious problem that needs correction. Again, though, I worry that my own history in the matter makes it difficult for other people to hear what I may say on the matter. Where is the rebel to go when he wishes to build a better world instead of destroy the good in what exists in this one?