Bryan Fischer used Tuesday's edition of Focal Point to make one of the most bizarre arguments he's made to date. He claimed the American Revolution wasn't really a war of rebellion. In the process, though, he seems to have declared his support for the old and completely discredited theory of divine right of kings.
I know what you're thinking--"What planet is this from?" Well, Romans 13:1-5 has long been reckoned as an explicit biblical prohibition against rebellion. But Fischer claims that once we declared independence, we became a sovereign nation--and therefore, when the British tried to pull us back in by armed means, it was an act of invasion by a foreign power. No, I'm not kidding--see for yourself (check out a shorter clip PFAW got here:
So let's see if we've got this right. The UK was invading a sovereign nation--but one that became sovereign by way of a unilateral declaration of independence, which by definition is an act of rebellion. Yeah, OK.
More telling, though, is that Fischer seems to be embracing the old idea that only God has the right to punish an unjust ruler. After all, Romans 13 was used for years to support the idea of divine right. When you look back, though, it shouldn't come as that big of a shock. When I was researching my IB extended essay during my senior year of high school, I discovered that the very idea of democracy was condemned as un-Christian by several preachers during the revolutionary era. Since Fischer and his buddies want to turn this nation into a Christian dictatorship, embracing divine right makes perfect sense.