Authorities and anti-authorities

When is it right to resist or disobey the government?

Excerpts from The True Church in the Last Days

By Vladimir Moss an Orthodox layman of Woking, Surrey, United Kingdom

Let us begin by studying the reign of the Antichrist.  In what does it consist?  What are its essential characteristics?

According to the holy apostles and fathers of the Church the reign of the Antichrist will be characterized by an extreme form of anarchy – that is, the absence of law and order.  Now the origin of all law and order is God, so all law and order, all true authority, is established by God.  That is the meaning of the apostle’s famous saying: “There is no power that is not of God; the powers that be are established by God” (Romans 13:1).  Christians honour the king and pray for the powers that be precisely in order to avoid the great evil of anarchy, “that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence” (I Timothy 2:2).  Since anarchy is opposed to God-established authority, it is opposed to God, and must therefore itself be opposed by all those who fear God and obey His holy will.

A ruler may be unjust and cruel, but as long as he prevents anarchy Christians must obey him.  Thus St. Irenaeus of Lyons writes: “Some rulers are given by God with a view to the improvement and benefit of their subjects and the preservation of justice; others are given with a view to producing fear, punishment and reproof; yet others are given with a view to displaying mockery, insult and pride – in each case in accordance with the deserts of the subjects.  [Does not this describe our president and our society? Editor’s note]   Thus…God’s judgment falls equally on all men”.  Again, St. Isidore of Pelusium writes that the evil ruler “has been allowed to spew out this evil, like Pharaoh, and, in such an instance, to carry out extreme punishment or to chastise those for whom great cruelty is required, as when the king of Babylon chastised the Jews.”

But there is a line beyond which an evil ruler ceases to be a ruler and becomes an anti-ruler, an unlawful tyrant, who is not to be obeyed.  Thus the Jews were commanded by God through the Prophet Jeremiah to submit to the king of Babylon, evil though he was; whereas they were commanded through another prophet, Moses, to resist and flee from the Egyptian Pharaoh, and rebelled again, with God’s blessing, under Antiochus Epiphanes.  For in the one case the authority,  though evil, was still an authority which it was beneficial to obey; whereas in the other cases the authority was in fact an anti-authority, obedience to which would have taken the people further away from God.

Anarchy, the absence of true authority, can be of two kinds: organized and disorganized.  When a true authority collapses, there usually follows a period of disorganized anarchy, which is characterized by individual crimes of all kinds – murder, robbery, rape, sacrilege, - that go unchecked and unpunished because of the absence of a true power.  Such was the period of Russian history that followed the collapse of the Orthodox empire in February 1917.  The Provisional government, having itself contributed to the collapse of the empire and having received its authority neither (through holy anointing) from God nor (by means of a popular vote) from men, was unable to check the rising tide of anarchy and collapsed ignominiously.  The disorganized anarchy of the Provisional government was followed by the organized anarchy of the Bolshevik “government”…

This was foreseen by many prophets.  And it was revealed that the coming period would be the beginning of the last times when it would be necessary to suffer in order not to receive the seal of the Antichrist. 

Now Christians are obliged to recognize every power that is in fact a power in the apostolic meaning of the word – that is, which at least tries to prevent anarchy by rewarding the good and punishing the bad (Romans 13:3); I Peter 2:14) Such a power does not have to be Christian:  even pagan, heretical and Muslim states punish those crimes that are recognized as such by the vast majority of mankind and are therefore recognized as legitimate by the Church.  However, such recognition can only be relative – relative, that is, to the degree to which the government does in fact establish order, - and in extreme case can be refused altogether.

Thus in the fourth century, the Persian King Sapor proposed to Hieromartyr Simeon, Bishop of Seleucia and Ctesiphon, that he worship the sun, in exchange for which he would receive every possible honour and gift.  But if he refused.  Now already before he had made this proposal to Simeon, King Sapor had started to kill the clergy, confiscate church property and raze the churches to the ground.  So when he was brought before the king for his reply, St. Simeon not only refused to worship the sun but also, upon entering, refused to recognize the king by bowing down.  This omission of his previous respect for the king’s authority was noticed and questioned by the King.  St. Simeon replied: “Before I bowed down to you, giving you honour as a king, but now I come being brought to deny my God and Faith.  It is not good for me to bow before an enemy of my God!”

Again, when Julian the Apostate (361-363) came to the throne, the Church refused to recognize him.  Thus St. Basil the Great prayed for the defeat of Julian in his wars against the Persians; and it was through his prayers that the apostate was in fact killed, as was revealed by God to the holy hermit Julian of Mesopotamia.  At this, St. Basil’s friend, St. Gregory the Theologian wrote: “ I call to spiritual rejoicing all those who constantly remained in fasting, in mourning and prayer, and by day and by night besought deliverance from the sorrows that surrounded us and found a reliable healing from the evils in unshakeable hope…

Again, when the Norman Duke William invaded England in 1066 with the blessing of the Pope, and was crowned as the first Catholic king of England in the following year, the brother-bishops and hieromartyrs Ethelric and Ethelwine solemnly anathematized both him and the Pope, and called on the people to rise up against the false authority (they did, and 20% of the English population was killed by the papists).  [At this time the Church of England was still Orthodox.]  Again, in 1611 St. Hermogen, patriarch of Moscow, called on the Russian people to rise up against the crypto-Catholic false Demetrius, although the latter had been anointed by a supposedly Orthodox patriarch.

The state that is refused recognition by the Church is the state of organized anarchy – that is, the state in which crime is not only not punished, as in disorganized anarchy, but is confirmed and recognized as lawful.  Thus the essence of antichristian power is not simply the doing of evil – all states, even the most Orthodox, at times do evil – but the systematic recognition of evil as good, of lawlessness as the law, of the abnormal as the norm and even the aim of society.  Such a state is “the mystery of lawlessness” (II Thessalonians 2:7).  [Immediately there comes to my mind illegal immigration, gay marriages, silence of morality thru so called political correctness, legalized abortions and its enforcement on religious groups thru healthcare, protection of the Black Panthers and their voter intimidation, attempts to overthrow and bypass the Constitution and Congress and the cover-up of organized anarchy in high places in the government, etc.]

Such a state was the Bolshevik regime, which, taking advantage of the disorganized anarchy prevailing under the Provisional government, not only did not restore order, but consolidated, intensified and organized the chaos, made it the norm, made it “lawful”.  Church tradition calls unlawful councils, councils that preach heresy instead of truth, “robber councils”.  In the same way, unlawful states such as the Bolshevik regime can be called “robber states”, insofar as murder, robbery and sacrilege become the norm under them – indeed, are committed primarily by the state itself.  Robber states cannot command the obedience of God-fearing Christians, for they are not authorities in the apostolic sense of the word, but “anti-authorities”.  Rather, such states must be rebuked and rejected by them.

That is why, on November 11, 1917, the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church addressed a letter to the faithful calling the revolution “descended from the Antichrist” and declaring: “Open combat is fought against the Christian Faith, in opposition to all that is sacred, arrogantly abasing all that bears the name of God (II Thessalonians 2:4)… But no earthly kingdom founded on ungodliness can ever survive: it will perish from internal strife and party dissension.  It took some 75 years for the atheistic state of Russia to fall and the fall is not yet complete or certain.  [During those 75 years millions of Russian Orthodox Christians were tortured, sent to insane asylums, imprisoned and martyred.  Thousands fled to the catacombs to worship in secret.  Thousands of priests and bishops were martyred and the number of local churches was reduced from some 30,0000 to less than 5,000.] 

In January, 1918, Patriarch Tikhon and the Local Council meeting in Moscow anathematized the Bolsheviks and commanded the faithful: “I adjure all of you who are faithful children of the Orthodox Church of Christ not to commune with such outcasts of the human race in any matter whatsoever; ‘cast out the wicked from among you’ (I Corinthians 5:13).”  In other words, the Blosheviks were to be regarded, not only as apostates from Christ (that was obvious), but also as having no moral authority, no claim to obedience whatsoever. 

[Many members of the Church succumbed to the Communist regime with its threats, intimidations and tortures.  Some priests and bishops did the same in order to survive.  The Church was infiltrated with KGB agents serving as priests and bishops placed there by the communist party, and some are still there today.  They continued to call themselves Orthodox but were called the “Living Church” vs. the dead or catacomb Church. [Sort of like the mega-churches of today vs. the Orthodox]  They tried to modernize and Westernize the Church as the government and populace desired.  They agreed to pledge allegiance to the atheist government and to cooperate with it.  The Great Whore of Revelation got in bed with the Beast .  The catacomb Church stills exists today as the True Orthodox Church of Russia.  The Russian Orthodox Church still exists as the “official” Church of Russia but the True Orthodox Christians around the world do not recognize them as Orthodox.  The term “True Orthodox” is used to distinguish those who hold the Orthodox Faith without compromise vs. those who innovate and adapt to ways of the world and to the heresy of Ecumenism.]