The Confusion Of Church And State

From The Christian Reader:

The Confusion of Church and State


by Eric Rauch



The separation of church and state, at least how it is commonly understood, is an unbiblical concept. When most people hear the phrase, they immediately call to mind an impenetrable wall that keeps church on one side and state on the other. This “wall,” whose masonry work is typically attributed to Thomas Jefferson, has become a major source of confusion for both sides of the debate, not to mention the citizens who find themselves caught in the middle.



The First Amendment to the Constitution states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” The first half of the amendment is where the debate over “separation” lies and is often referred to as the “establishment clause.” It should be immediately obvious that the restriction of the “establishment clause” is directed to the state (Congress shall make no law…), not the church. The Constitution follows the biblical model of church/state separation in that it recognizes a jurisdictional separation between the two and limits the authority of the state over the church and not the other way around.



The modern church needs to understand once again the important distinction between separation of power and separation of jurisdiction. The church should be actively and intentionally influencing the state to perform its God-given role of promoting the good and punishing the bad. The state wields the sword, both to protect and judge its citizens; and the church should be preaching and modeling righteousness. The strongest form of punishment that the church can pronounce is excommunication (refusing communion to an individual), while the state is given the power of capital punishment (refusing life to an individual) when necessary.



In a powerful essay on this most vital topic, Dr. Archie Jones clearly makes the case for the necessity of Christians to recapture an understanding of the church/state relationship. Too often the topic is surrounded by misinformation, half-truths, and no references to either the Bible or history. This essay can be found in the reprint of James Willson’s book, originally published in 1853, The Establishment and Limits of Civil Government: An Exposition of Romans 13:1-7. Dr. Jones’ essay is a needed introduction, so much so that I have decided to run it in its entirety as a series of articles. His essay will be broken into four parts, beginning today and running through the next three Mondays.



In an age where the Federal government has overstepped its constitutional and biblical limits in just about every area of human activity, it is incumbent upon Christians to educate themselves and their children to the proper role of government and its relationship to the church. Dr. Jones’ essay and James Willson’s book are two writings that should be read by every Christian. Providentially for us, they are both contained in one volume.



The Confusion of Church and State

by Dr. Archie Jones



It is difficult to imagine a subject of more importance to Christians today than the subject of this great book, The Establishment and Limits of Civil Government: An Exposition of Romans 13:1–7. For civil government, as the word of God itself tells us in the passage analyzed so ably by James M. Willson, is an institution ordained by God to serve Him as His ministry for His ethical purposes as they relate to civil government: to wield the power of the sword to punish, restrain those who do evil, and to protect and give praise to those who do that which is good. And as this careful, thoughtful explication of this key New Testament passage on the ministry of civil government is republished after nearly 160 years, Christians throughout the world are beset by civil governments which function more as ministries of Satan than as ministries of the living God. Moreover, Americans, the beneficiaries of a great (though not perfect) tradition of Christian civil government and law, [1] have been faced for some time with a civil government that has not only been dedicated to overturning virtually all of the principles of its own Constitution but has also committed, in the name of an anti-biblical system of “morality” and unaccountable “rights,” to violating every God-given principle of civil government, law, liberty and justice.



As a people, we deserve such an ungodly civil government, for we have long since turned from anything like a fully biblical faith in God, and so also from a biblical understanding of the nature and purposes of His ministry of civil government and from obedience to His commandments. How we got ourselves into such a position is a long, complicated story. But it can be summarized in Americans’ following after modern man-centered thought. This was done by crafty men seizing the opportunities presented by historical circumstances to subvert our Constitution, centralize our governmental system, pervert our laws, and destroy our liberty in the name of autonomous amoral “freedom.” Christians share in the guilt since many have abandoned the Bible as the whole counsel of God as fully inspired and authoritatively applicable to all areas of thought and life—including God’s ministry of civil government. Modern man-centered thought is self-consciously in rebellion against God, the Bible, Christianity, and biblical ethics. American man-centered intellectuals’ thinking has generally followed European thought, lagging a decade or more behind European intellectual fashions for most of our history. Humanistic American thought has followed European humanistic thought from rationalism (faith in the infallibility of man’s unaided reason), from the 19th through the early 20th centuries; to empiricism (faith in the scientific method), from the mid-19th through the 20th centuries; to irrationalism (belief that the world and life are meaningless and standardless), from the late 19th to the 21st century. Under the influence of rationalism men abandoned Christian ethics, jettisoned biblical limits on the authority of civil government, and sought to create rationalistically conceived plans for perfecting man and society through the power of civil government. Under the influence of empiricism men scrapped the limits which Christian ethics and the Constitution place on civil government and sought to remake society and economic life by the application of “science” to the policies of civil government. Under the influence of irrationalism men have sought to have civil government follow the unrestrained will of the president, unelected federal judges, congressional majorities, or a self-anointed intellectual elite. Various strains of socialism (rationalistic utopian socialism in the 19th century, rationalistic democratic socialism in the 19th and 20th centuries, pseudo-scientific Marxian socialism and communism in the 19th and into the 21st centuries, and irrational “pragmatism” and fascism in the 20th and 21st centuries) accompanied these main currents of modern man-centered thought. Together they transformed American liberalism from a small government to big government ideology, radically altered the ethical and political content of American education, used the “public schools” to secularize, indoctrinate and manipulate Americans’ thinking, and prepared the populace to look for social and economic “salvation” through an all-powerful, unlimited central government.



Read Part Two>>





Notes:

[1] Benjamin F. Morris, The Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States (Powder Springs, Georgia: American Vision, [1864] 2007); William J. Federer, America’s God and Country Encyclopedia of Quotations (Coppell, Texas: FAME Publishing, Inc., 1994); Ellis Sandoz, A Government of Laws: Political Theory, Religion, and the American Founding (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1990); Charles S. Hyneman and Donald S. Lutz, eds., American Political Writing during the Founding Era 1760-1805, 2 volumes (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1983); M. Stanton Evans, The Theme Is Freedom; Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1994); John Eidsmoe, Christianity and the Constitution: The Faith of Our Founding Fathers (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1987); Gary DeMar, America’s Christian History (Powder Springs, Georgia: American Vision, 2005); David J. Brewer, The United States: A Christian Nation (Powder Springs, Georgia: American Vision, [1905] 1996); Bishop Charles B. Galloway, Christianity and the American Commonwealth; or The Influence of Christianity in Making This Nation (Powder Springs, Georgia: American Vision, [1898] 2005); Rousas J. Rushdoony, This Independent Republic; Studies in the Nature and Meaning of American History (Vallecito, California: Chalcedon Foundation, [1964] 2008); Rousas J. Rushdoony, The Nature of the American System (Vallecito, California: Chalcedon Foundation, [1965] 2008); and Archie P. Jones, “Christianity in the Constitution: The Intended Meaning of the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment,” unpublished PhD. Dissertation, University of Dallas, 1991.