Welcome to the Breakpoint podcast and our Q&A segment Ask the Colson Center.

I'm Shane Morris, host of the upstream podcast and one of the writers for Breakpoint.

I'm joined today by John Stone Street, president of the Colson Center and the voice of Breakpoint.

Today we're answering your questions.

These were sparked by Breakpoint commentaries, short courses, and the Colson Fellows program.

If you'd like to send us a

question to answer here on the show, please send us an email at ask the Colson Center at

colsoncenter.org. John, let's jump right into questions today because we've got a lot of

interesting ones. The first one's from someone who writes in, you've spoken about a theology

of getting fired. My question question is how does the doctrine of

the lesser magistrate or the doctrine of interposition fit into this for public officials so those are

two at least 50 cent words maybe a dollar each john the first one the doctrine of the lesser magistrate

is something that comes out of the Reformation.

And it's the idea, and I think it was out of the Reformation.

There may be some important precedence in medieval history as well.

But the idea, as the reformers understood it, was that a magistrate at a lower level who believes that his higher level magistrate, so say a lord or an elector to a king or an emperor, can disobey an unjust order by the higher magistrate in the service of the higher law of God, and that the person

under that magistrate, whom he or she is protecting, can still be in obedience to the biblical

command in Romans, for instance,

to be subject to the governing authorities. Interposition, as I understand it, is a really similar

concept. And it's also similar to the idea of nullification where a state can reject an edict from

the federal government in certain circumstances in a morally defensible way

if that edict is unjust. So for example, if a state had said, you know what, we're not going

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