If someone had said, when I graduated seminary, that the biggest test of pastoral wisdom in my first two decades of ministry would be a worldwide viral pandemic, I might have said to lay off the dystopian novels. Even had I believed such a prophecy, I would have foreseen opportunity for the church to shine God’s mercy and truth in the midst of great suffering, blessing the powers of the age through our service. I surely would not have guessed that public health and safety might become a battle line between the church and the powers. The naivete of youth.

It feels pretentious to say, given the trials of saints in other contexts, but in my small afflictions of the past two years, my mind has turned to Jesus’ words to His twelve before their first mission: “Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Mt 10:16). I take this to mean, generally, that His disciples will live the life that comes from heaven amid earthly realities that may be very inhospitable. More pointedly, while pursuing the lifegiving ends of God’s kingdom on earth, they will meet obstacles and opposition around which they must maneuver, not by means unworthy of the Prince of peace, but sometimes by means entailing great craft, subtlety, and subversive cunning. They will ordinarily not operate through direct confrontation and disruption, but will find a way to preach and live the gospel – worming through loopholes, staying just under surveillance, subverting criticism with good works, putting Caesar in his place by acknowledging his place and no more. If they can live at peace with all men, so be it; but they must preach and practice obedient faith, by any means.

Dr. Farrow’s lead essay argues for openly disobeying certain civil mandates related to the COVID pandemic. Is this serpentine wisdom? The innocence of doves? A good “serpent” knows: to answer requires context.

The focus of Dr. Farrow’s concern, as I understand it, is state-mandated lockdowns and vaccine requirements that either prevent gathered worship entirely (in the case of lockdowns), or prevent certain Christians from attending worship (proof-of-vaccine). (He does mention lesser mandates, such as masking, but these don’t seem to be what prompts his call for civil disobedience.) It’s important to his essay that such strong measures persist two years into the pandemic, when, due to various factors, the severity of viral effects has decreased. In the case of proof-of-vaccine mandates, it seems likely this measure will continue indefinitely.

At the level of Christian “dovelikeness,” there are two great priorities for saints whose citizenship is in heaven. One is our duty to love God in all the ways He requires of us; the other is our duty to love our neighbor, which includes obligations both to serve the good of individual neighbors, and to promote civil order insofar as it doesn’t preclude loving God or neighbor (civil order being a temporal good we are to pray for, cf. 1 Tm 2:2).

In general over the past two years, I’ve found myself advocating as a pastor for “dovelike” responses to COVID mandates. True, those here in the States have been overall less restrictive than those in Dr. Farrow’s Canada, but given that, I’ve been surprised and dismayed by how quickly many Christians have pushed for open rebellion against the requirements. I’ve made (graciously, I hope) many arguments that would push against the tenor of Dr. Farrow’s essay, including the following:

1. Discerning the undeclared motives or intent of government actors is notoriously difficult; and proving ill motives or intent don’t exist is nearly impossible, which should make us especially wary of confirmation bias. I’ve tried to resist too-hasty readings (to which I myself am prone) of an “unstated purpose” under the declared purpose of the mandates. As a friend put it, maybe most of our officials are just trying to do their job in promoting the common health?
2. Being told what to do isn’t “tyranny.” Maybe it’s an especially American thing, but it seems some of us really hate being given an order, especially if we disagree with it. We easily justify a rebellious spirit as resistance to “tyranny.” Yet, biblically and historically considered, bad government – including stupid, unreasonable, overreaching, or even to an extent unjust government – isn’t necessarily tyrannical.
3. Not every interference with worship is a violation of conscience. My conscience is the Lord’s alone; my body is a public thing, subject to laws that may legitimately interfere with its liberty. This is true of public gatherings of bodies; freedom to assemble is not absolute. At times, bodies may be lawfully restrained from doing what would otherwise be a duty, because the law of love reflected in the law of the polis requires such restraint.
4. Patience is a virtue. Two years feels very long; but that feeling must be relativized by considerations of ongoing risk, and also the workings of civil process. Perhaps some regulations we chafe under are still reasonable. Even if they are unreasonable and unjust, it may take time to seek redress. Can we wait?
5. “Disobedience may do more harm than good.” Dr. Farrow mentions this principle in his essay, but, as my friend Alastair Roberts observes, it receives short shrift in his concerns about tyranny. Yet it is crucial: worse may come through disrupting social order than through the evils of the order itself. We must stay awake to how civil disobedience could cause even more trouble than what currently troubles us.

Now, having made these arguments, and still believing they are sound, I don’t think they cover the whole of the situation Dr. Farrow describes. Given what he is facing (and similar scenarios exist elsewhere), I believe further wisdom is required, in a serpentine mode. What is the precise scenario Dr. Farrow puts before us?

First, it is a scenario involving the Christian duty (than which none higher can be conceived) of worship. As noted above, worship occurs under dual jurisdiction: the spiritual authority of the church to order its worship according to God’s Word; and the authority of magistrates to regulate public assemblies in the interests of civic justice, peace, and safety.

Second, it is a scenario in which magistrates are actively preventing public assembly for worship: sometimes by forbidding gathered worship entirely (lockdown), sometimes by forbidding certain worshipers to attend (proof-of-vaccine). The former (lockdown), though more extreme, could be borne with patiently, because it is indiscriminate (not directed solely at churches), temporary, and does not divide the Body of Christ. The latter (proof-of-vaccine), while less extreme, is actually more troubling, and seems to be Dr. Farrow’s main concern.

Third, the proof-of-vaccine scenario is not one in which certain members of society are being discriminatorily isolated (and thus prevented from attending worship) because they pose a clear, immediate, and serious risk to civic justice, peace, or safety. I know that’s a strong assertion. Is it warranted, and why does it matter?

It matters, because absent a clear, immediate, and serious risk, civil magistrates have no authority to decide who may or may not attend the church’s public worship. That authority lies with the church, and ultimately with the Word of God, which delimits who may and may not join in the communion of saints. Christians are commanded to worship, and to assemble for this purpose, and there must be at least a reasonable, if not compelling, basis for a magistrate to interfere with this. (This is reflected, for example, in the U.S. Supreme Court’s “free exercise” caselaw.)

What of the assertion that unvaccinated worshipers pose no clear, immediate, and serious risk? As the world has dealt with a wildly contagious virus over the past two years, it has been interesting to note a shift in public rhetoric about health. There has been an extraordinarily intense focus on preventing the spread of the virus, which made perfect sense in the early days of the pandemic. Vaccines were one part of that prevention focus, and an effective one. However, as time has worn on, many public voices seem to have lost sight of the threshold beyond which the risk of contagion is simply normal. There have always been contagious diseases (with potentially deadly effects for some), and we have all gone about our lives together notwithstanding. What we have done, out of care for our neighbors, is to isolate those known (through symptomatic evidence) to be contagious, or those known to have extremely high susceptibility to infection. At our current juncture in the pandemic, many authorities (including, apparently, those in Dr. Farrow’s context) seem to be pursuing something else – something more like elimination of risk, such that those who don’t embrace maximal risk-elimination measures are deemed enemies of the public good. This, despite the fact that the effects of the virus are waning closer to something like what used to be normal (not least because vaccines are widely available); and with newer variants, the difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated in terms of infectability and transmissibility, while still real, is not so stark as it once was.

The result, in such contexts, has been an increasingly hostile posture toward those who choose not to vaccinate, and a determined movement to isolate them as completely and permanently (if they don’t change their minds) as possible. If you won’t self-impose a measure that temporarily and partially reduces (but doesn’t eliminate) your risk of infection and transmission, you will be involuntarily barred, not from selective sectors of public life that require extreme protection against disease, but from most of public life, including public worship. Where such a view prevails, it seems that the goal is not normal health conditions for society, but a kind of purity – an imaginary state of public health that is uncontaminated and uncontaminable.

Whatever merit all of this may have in the civil realm (I myself would contest it, and thankfully, some rulers have acted more reasonably), can it be the rule for welcome into the corporate fellowship of Christ’s Body? Can it be that we will bar Christians from assembled worship indefinitely, not because they are sick, not even because they may be sick but asymptomatic (which would be true of the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike), but simply because they have not self-imposed a measure that has helped slow the spread of a virus that will soon (if current trends continue) be no more deadly than other diseases we have lived with in the past?

Public safety is a good Christians should love and support. We should love the good of our neighbor’s health, and the good of civil regulations that provide for it. These are not, however, the only or the highest goods. If a government takes upon itself the task of eliminating risk by permanently isolating those who are not a risk under any normal, reasonable definition of the term; and if the effect of this isolation is to exclude members of Christ from the fellowship of His Body until such time as they conform to the new codes of purity, then spiritual goods are being subjugated to temporal goods in a way that bears no real relation to neighbor love, and there comes a time on this trajectory for the faithful to say, “We must obey God rather than men.” I don’t face such a scenario where I minister; but Dr. Farrow reminds us there are brothers and sisters who do. What, then?

To be sure, we must never join the wolves. That’s not a minor point in our bellicose age. If the Lord’s people, after much prayer and long forbearance, find it is impossible to obey both God and men, and lawful means of seeking redress have failed, they may have recourse to humble noncompliance. But such civil disobedience, if necessary, must be civil: reluctant, peaceful, ready to suffer penalties. Christians aim to renew civil order, not overthrow it; there must be nothing in our methods or rhetoric to suggest otherwise. It must be plain that we are moved by love for God and man, including the good of our polis.

We are not the first to wrestle with how to order duties under the law of Christian love. Amid a series of deadly plagues that visited Geneva in the late 16th century, Theodore Beza argued that, while it was not sinful to flee to escape the plague, it was better to stay and even endanger one’s life in order to discharge “the duties of Humanitie” to family and neighbors:

I confesse that they offend much lesse, who when they might otherwise, with a good Conscience, with­draw themselves, had rather yet tarry; and to venture and endanger their Lives, rather than that they might seem to have forsaken their Neigh­bour, or Family. I confesse, I say, that these offend much lesse than those, who being carried away with too much distrust, or with unmeasurable fear of death, forgetting and neglecting all duties of Humanitie, have this on­ly before their eyes, Away quickly, a far off, long ere you return again. Men surely most worthy to be thrust out of all company of men, the bonds whereof they break all to pieces.

However Beza might have applied this advice in COVID times, his underlying point is clear: even in a public health crisis, there remains a hierarchy of goods in the Christian order of love, and a corresponding hierarchy of duties. Sometimes risking one’s life is a duty, to care for a neighbor. Sometimes refraining from public life (even worship) is a duty, to prevent risk to one’s neighbors. Stopping infectious disease is not, however, the only good, or our only duty. There may come a time (and we must pray for wisdom to know when it is) when assembling for worship is a duty – with all who call Jesus Lord – not “being carried away with unmeasurable fear of death,” and despite civil ordinances to the contrary, because what health risks may exist no longer justify refusing communion to saints. Is this such a time? In many contexts, we are not pressed for an answer. In Dr. Farrow’s, the issue is now unavoidable, and we may be grateful for his putting it to all of us so starkly.

Benjamin Miller is Pastor of Trinity Church, Syosset, NY.