The Intrigue of the "13s"...

Holding faith and a good conscience. By rejecting this, some have made shipwreck of their faith. I Timothy 1:19

To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure; but both their minds and their consciences are defiled. Titus 1:15

For whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything. 1 John 3:20

This thought experiment emerged while reading Robert McAfee Brown’s essays on “Vietnam and the Exercise of Dissent” in his 1972 book, The Pseudonyms of God and his “Vietnam: Crisis of Conscience,” a transcribed talk he gave at a Catholic church in St. Paul, Minnesota in the Spring of 1967 (…the year of the highest U.S. troop deployment to Vietnam other than the following year when 50,000 additional troops were deployed - see here.) (As an educational offering, you can read this copyright of “Vietnam: Crisis of Conscience here.) In the 1960s and 70s the Presbyterian minister and other ministers were caused to dissent, then to protest, and then to civil disobedience to oppose the U.S. war in Vietnam. I recommend the book and the talk for helping one to be sensitized by another critical episode of American history when the authorities could not be trusted to speak honestly and truthfully about the immoralities and plain, greater evil being waged under the guise of the moral and just strategic use of exceptional power by an exceptional nation on a weak, vulnerable people. I understand and agree that there were multiple rationales under which decent and morally intentioned men and women did what they did in the Vietnam War for the sake of combating real perceived threats and very real fears based on unknown and unexpected possibilities. But is it not accurate to say that American leaders in many roles and through many agencies and institutions, ramped up the morality-angle of a “just war” to persuade just the kind of “quagmire” of complications and ambiguities in which they could successfully quell the troubled conscience of many citizens in order to call that which was evil, good, and that which was good, evil.

The “13s” are the thirteenth chapters of Daniel, Romans, and Revelation. Daniel 13 is not included in the Protestant canon though it is in the Catholic Bible and the scriptures of the Eastern Church – the short chapter can be read here. The background for its exclusion from the Bible of Western Protestantism can be assessed here. Romans 13 has been used traditionally to instruct Christians to obey their governments and civil authorities without clarifying the condition of civil authorities’ moral conduct and directly in opposition to Jesus’ command to “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” in Matthew 22:21. Revelation 13 is the fantastic and wondrous prophecy which foretells the time when a sole individual leader of a totalitarian global system requires the obeisance of all humanity through its total control of the worldwide system of supply and demand. Such sovereign totalitarian rule will appear as both a system and its individual leader – see here.

What is the intrigue? It could be a number of things but I call your attention to the individual conscience in relation to empire. By simple definition, conscience is “the sense or consciousness of the moral goodness or blameworthiness of one's own conduct, intentions, or character together with a feeling of obligation to do right or be good” (see here). Fair enough. However, conscience in the Bible is depicted as “clean or seared,” “good or evil.” (See here). Conscience in the Biblical perspective is an “either-or” condition of one’s comportment in  relation to God and His standard of right and wrong. Again, fair enough. Conscience for the Biblical Christian is “clean” and therefore good, or it is “seared” and therefore evil.

To the intrigue of the “13s.” In Daniel 13, young Daniel failed to subject himself to the authorities as in later history of the people of God they were instructed by Paul in Romans 13. On the other hand in the future time of Revelation 13 the vast majority of God’s people will have gone along in obedience to the authorities and it will be a gross sin.

By Paul’s instructions in Romans 13 which were absolute in relation to the never-changing God and His absolute standard, was Daniel not disobedient by failing to subject himself to the verdict of his the elders, the authorities over the people of God? On the other hand, the instructions of Romans 13 to subject oneself to the authorities will be obeyed in Revelation 13 and will have been followed “to the T,” and yet such subjection and obedience to authorities will be a sin.

By Revelation 13, the people of God in Daniel’s time went along with the decision of the authorities to carry out the appropriate judgement on the sin of the young righteous woman as charged by the authorities, and yet the people of God were in error and would have committed gross sin against a righteous woman unless Daniel stopped the people’s act of subjection, Daniel’s act in itself to be disobedience to St. Paul’s instructions in Romans 13. And the people of God in the time of Romans 13 were instructed, again by the authority of the major writer of the New Testament, to subject themselves to go along with the decision of the authorities as instructed and subject themselves to the authorities which would have been in conformance to the Word of God and to not do so will have then been a sin.

Do the “13s” not present us with intrigue?