And you thought "freedom is slavery" was an Orwellian idea. The inspiration is thoroughly Christian, and "The question is", said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master, that's all".
The apostle Peter said,
This is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as slaves of God. Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor. (1 Peter 2:15–17)
“Live as people who are free.”
Peter had just said, “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether to the emperor as supreme, or to governors” (1 Peter 2:13). So how can you “be subject” and “be free” at the same time?
Peter’s answer is that Christians are “slaves of God.” In other words, when you submit to a “human institution” (1 Peter 2:13), you don’t do it as the slave of that institution. You do it in freedom, because you are slaves of God, not man. God owns his people — by creation and redemption. ...
When we submit, we do so for the Lord’s sake. Because he said to. God’s ownership of his people strips every decisive entitlement from human authority. It turns every act of human compliance into worship. When we submit, we do so for the glory of our one Owner and Master. Life is radically Godward.
More.
Every act of compliance is worship, eh?
In the 3rd century many Christians found one act of compliance utterly beyond the pale. They refused to comply with an edict of Decius requiring everyone to perform a sacrifice to the gods in the presence of a Roman magistrate, which was deemed sufficient to demonstrate one's loyalty to the empire.
Some Christians at the time thought such sacrifices to be idolatrous. Many were killed for refusing to offer them.
Many people today, and not just Christians, think that the vaccines can cause harm, to their children and/or to themselves, and refuse to take them or allow them. Some people are losing their jobs as a result.
Many wonder what happened to the ideas we grew up with, that in America health decisions are between the individual and her doctor and are no one else's business, especially not the government's business. Many today wonder what happened to the "first, do no harm" line in the Hippocratic oath.
Circumstances likewise changed a great deal between the composition of I Peter and the 3rd century. There was no formal empire-wide persecution of Christians before the Decian edict of 250 AD. In the absence of official edicts requiring apostasy, obeying the law was not at issue and was promoted in the interests of evangelism and comity, especially in the 1st century.
Similarly Paul in I Corinthians 8 knew that eating meat offered to idols was nothing because no other gods actually exist, but that weak minds found it offensive, for which reason he said that one should not eat meat offered to idols to protect their feelings.
This advice had unintended consequences. The weak minds proliferated, to the point that by the 3rd century the Christians were literally a people living apart from the wider Roman society, attracting suspicion and ultimately the ire of the authorities for failing to behave like Romans. Rod Dreher fans should take note. His prescription in The Benedict Option might be more cause than effect of the troubles he believes are coming, and may prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Today vaccine compliance earns you a proof of vaccination card. With it you can go about the normal business of living, including going to work. In the 3rd century, sacrifice earned you a libellus, a proof of sacrifice card. With it you could escape execution.
You would expect that in a liberal society, a free society such as that bequeathed to us by the Protestant founders of America who inherited the ideas of Paulinism, the, if you will, weak-minded anti-vaxxers among us would be cut the same slack Paul cut those who were superstitious about idol meat.
But we don't live in that world any longer. We live in an absurd world where the vaccinated, the protected, promote fear of the unvaccinated, which is superstition. It's getting to be more and more like the 3rd century world of suspicion and compulsion.
John Piper has as little to say to the one as to the other. But the 3rd century speaks volumes.
