The Virtue of Disobedience

We are taught as Christians to submit to one another, to obey the law, to submit to our rulers, to our pastors, to our parents. We all know the Fourth Commandment: Honor your father and your mother.

Yet sometimes obeying the law requires disobedience, and that can be a very hard lesson. Sometimes, for instance, the government requires us to sin, and we must disobey: “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). That is to say, sometimes we must disobey. Yet at some of these  times disobedience can seem on the surface to be very wrong. It was, after all, to the officers of the law that Peter had said this. And this was, moreover, when these same officers then had already chided them for their disobedience, saying, “Did not we straitly command you that ye should not teach in this name?” (v28) And then, when they had called the apostles, and beaten them, they commanded yet again that they should not speak in the name of Jesus, but the apostles defied them immediately, for they went forth and “ceased not to teach and preach Jesus Christ” (v42).

Of course we all agree that it was right for them to do this, and this passage is commonly used in our catechesis on the fourth commandment as an implied exception to the rule established by the fourth commandment.

But is it an exception? And how can there be, for that matter, exceptions to the Ten Commandments? The text of the Commandents does not admit exceptions at all. Would it not be not better, then, to see this detail as, rather, a particular instance of obedience that contravenes the normal course of obedience to earthly authorities? In the case of the apostles in Acts 5, we must see that there is virtue in certain kinds of disobedience. When commanded to sin, as our catechetical helps also explain, we must disobey. In such a case, obedience to the command would itself be sin, because it is the command that is out-of-bounds, null and void. Earthly authorities do not in fact have absolute authority, but are themselves under God.

So when in 2020 the government forbade us to gather for worship—as was the case in Illinois at least during the early stages of the covid mess—it was also a clear instance in which disobedience to that order would have been virtuous and proper, and obedience would have been sinful. It would have been proper not merely in some sense that causes the Third Commandment to take precedence somehow over the Fourth, but that, as in the case of the apostles in Acts, obedience to the command would have been sin, because the command is null and void, and not at all an earthly authority we should obey under the Fourth Commandment.

So also we are encouraged to sing unto the Lord. Can earthly government ever tell us that we should not? Can fear or threat of disease make us reconsider? What is the meaning of the confirmation vow we took that we would suffer all, even death, rather than to turn away from this confession and Church? Indeed I am convinced that the well-known Biblical admonition that we should not forsake the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is (Hebrews 10:25) was written for a church under duress, likely a duress brought on by governmental authorities. The temptation to forsake, in the case of those hearers, was likely not a temptation brought on by a desire to sleep in on a Sunday morning, but by fear of the consequences of assembling.

The matter of the virtue in disobedience is something even our children need to learn as well. When they are taught, rightly, that they out to be “mild, obedient, good as He” (from “Once in  Royal David’s City”), they must also be taught some wisdom. The boy Jesus knew he would be disappointing his parents when he lingered behind at the temple in Jerusalem. His disobedience to their desire was not an exception to their parental authority, but was a virtuous obedience to his Father. To be sure, this is a tricky matter, and sometimes such things are also taught as well by example as by instruction. When our children see us occasionally seeing the need to disobey, they learn.

Docile compliance with anything the government may impose upon is is not virtuous. It is laziness of mind. What is required in every case is a hope and prayer for the clarity of sight that sees whether the earthly authority is within its own need of obedience to the higher authority of God or outside of it. And this is because obedience to earthly authority is not always virtuous. Sometimes, without a doubt, it is disobedience that is virtuous. And here begins the sometimes difficult search for wisdom in the fear of the Lord.