A Christian Manifesto - Part 3

What we want is a return to real freedom, and especially real freedom for all religions. In other words, all we want is what the First Amendment was written for. That's all we're asking for.

We are asking for that which the First Amendment promised, which our fathers and forefathers in this country lived, fought, and died for. But we must use every method to stand for the high view of human life against the snowballing low view of human life, which surrounds us under the hypocritical but high-sounding names such as choice. These are hypocritical things.

Choice, in this case, equals, if I had a blackboard here, what it equals is the right to kill human life for my own selfish purposes, whether it's my child's life or whether it's society choosing other life to kill. That's what it's made to mean. When a government negates the law of God, it abrogates its authority.

That's the central message of the Christian Manifesto. It's what Peter and Paul said as they stood there before the Sanhedrin. We must pray God rather than man.

It's what the reformers stood for. It's what the founding fathers stood for. Listen again.

I mean it, and it's rooted into the whole view of the Christian past. When a government commands something which is contrary to the law of God, it abrogates its authority. And at that point, it becomes not only the privilege but the duty of the Christian to disobey that government.

That is what the founding fathers of this country did in the name of throwing off tyranny. That is what the early Christians did. That is why they were thrown to the beasts in the Roman arena.

Every appropriate legal, political, and governmental means must be used. But the final bottom line, and I've invented that term in the Christian Manifesto to hope people really get hold of it, the final bottom line the early Christians, the people of the Reformation, the founding fathers of this country faced and acted on is the realization that if there is no place for disobeying the government, that government has been put in the place of the living God. At such a point, that government has been made nothing less than a false God.

No, we must say no. Caesar is not to be put in the place of God, and we as Christians in the name of the Lordship of Christ in all of life must so think and act on the appropriate level at the given moment where we are. And if unhappily it becomes necessary that that level includes an open disobedience of the government, we must walk that road.

You cannot say hooray for solidarity and do any less. You cannot. We're in the same place, though on a different level.

My final sentence is this. Christ must be the final Lord and not society and not Caesar. Christ must be the final Lord and not society and not Caesar.

Thank you, Dr. Schaefer. Please be seated. I'd like to also introduce Mrs. Schaefer.

Would you stand, please? This dear woman has stood by his side all these years, a great woman of God. And in the stillness and the quietness of this moment as our heads are bowed together to internalize what we've heard, a man who three years ago, a little more than that, was told that he has cancer and that he can expect to live three weeks to three months, miraculously is still walking, living, breathing, preaching three years, three months later. And I believe that God left him on this earth, though he still has difficult days ahead.

God left him on this earth to articulate and to reduce to writing the issues that face the free world today. Either Christ is Lord or he is not Lord. And we ought to obey God rather than men.

The destruction of human life, the promotion of a secular humanistic society, a court system, a public school system, that is sold out to a philosophy foreign to that believed by the founding fathers, has brought us to the place where we either must change society or defy it. And that is a costly choice. The Polish people have chosen that decision and they're paying for it.

And much of the communist world can be described accordingly. Real freedom begins when a man, a woman, believes the gospel, the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, and trust Jesus as personal Lord and Savior. He said, you shall know the truth, the truth shall make you free.