History of Christianity: The Relationship between Church and State

Dear Colleagues,

Religion is omnipresent. It is entangled within the events of history and the development of human relations in society. It permeates all of culture, with its presence providing a foundation for society’s most sacred beliefs. Humans look to God as the “ground of all being” (Paul Tillich), refusing to accept the happenstance of blind and chaotic events and hoping to find an ideal standard, moral significance, and ultimate purpose or mission to lend life in society some meaning.

This basic understanding of religion came under attack in Western civilization when deism arose in England during the seventeenth century and permeated the subsequent “enlightened” era with its talk of human independence of God. English deists and French philosophes attacked the Judeo-Christian tradition, especially the church’s concept of grace or dependence upon God, extolling the rational ability of autonomous human beings in establishing their own truth. The deist concept of human autonomy led to the modern secular view of government as living outside the concerns of religion or separated from religion in the strict sense. Religion became a “private matter” of self-understanding or personal speculation that had no serious contribution to make within our corporate lives.

This concept of church and state continued in the modern world, even long after the philosophical and theological community had discredited the rational hybris of deism and the Enlightenment. Today, like the deists, most professional rigorous philosophers find it difficult to escape the phenomenal world and talk about metaphysical or transcendent ideas such as value and meaning. Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “The world is all that is the case. . . . What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Modern theologians tended to agree and thought of reason as incapable of obtaining a religious or transcendent experience apart from divine grace. Karl Barth said, “In the cosmos God is hidden and man is blind.”

Historically, it is simply false to follow the deists and think of Christianity as merely exerting a negative influence on society. Along with the negative, Christianity brought many positive ideals to the forefront in its attempt to reshape society. The theology of the church provided much of the spiritual matrix for the development of the most sacred political ideals in Western culture.

Its spirit of equality and integration led to democratic participation of all people in society. Jesus started the process by rejecting the purity laws of the Pharisees or “separate ones” and integrating the people of the land (am ha-aretz) into his ministry. Paul extended the message to the Gentiles and made integration or equality the heart of his gospel, rejecting the artificial barriers that society erected between “Jews and Gentiles, slave and free, male and female” (Gal. 3:28). The Reformation revived this emphasis and proclaimed the “priesthood of the believers,” using the doctrine to establish democratic polities among groups such as the Puritans and Huguenots and changing the structure of the civil government into their image. Quakers went even farther with the doctrine and became the first group in the world to fight for the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women.

The Judeo-Christian tradition also brought morality to the forefront in the Western world. In the twelfth century, the growth of canon law placed a check on the wantonness of kings and replaced rex lex with lex rex (i.e., “the law is king”). Later, William Ockham, Jean Gerson, and the decretalists extended the Graeco-Roman metaphysical tradition concerning natural law to speak of the natural rights of citizens—rights to their liberties and possessions that no king or pope might alienate or destroy.

Christianity’s doctrine of total depravity led to placing countervailing forces upon the government. The religion possessed a dark anthropology that suspected the motivation and designs of people and their rulers. This doctrine was used to place checks and balances between the branches of government to prevent the hybris of one from gaining too much power and destroying the freedom and participation of others. Puritans emphasized this teaching and developed the concept of federal government; that is, a government based on covenant (foedus) or social contract. For the Puritans, the government was responsible to the people; the people elected the officials and might depose them, even though a bloody revolution if necessary.

Christianity’s doctrine of liberty became central to the West during modern times in defining the essential purpose of government. Paul said, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Do not be enslaved to a yoke of bondage (Gal. 5:1).” He refused to enslave believers to the details of a legalistic religion or allow anyone to compromise the free expression of another one’s faith (Rom. 14). William Walwyn and the Levellers of the seventeenth century used this passage of Paul in Romans to dream of a society where freedom, pluralism, and liberty of conscience were its most essential feature, where Anglicans, Anabaptists, Independents, Papists, and Socinians might live together in harmony. They added to the exhortations of Paul the tolerant example of Jesus in rejecting the sword, emphasizing the paradigm of the NT over the OT, as did so many other champions of freedom and toleration, Christian and non-Christian alike.

These and other examples mentioned in this Special Issue only represent a small sample of the relation or pervading influence of the church on the state. The relation certainly discounts any strict attempt to separate the two, but it does not imply a simple merger between them. From the very beginning, the church was assigned a different function, role, or “order” to play in society than the state (hypotassō), to preach a gospel of grace and forgiveness outside the mission of the government and its coercive forces (Rom. 13). The message of the NT related to personal ethics and individual spirituality and contained no specific intension to recreate society or make a direct transition into societal action. The exhortation to feed the poor did not demand the creation of a social welfare state; the exhortation to forgive all debts and turn the other cheek did not call for an emancipation from the judicial system or department of defense. The church was summoned to subsist as a cosmopolitan fellowship of believers within a multitude of cultures and systems of governance, not pick sides in the contest between nations.

Of course, the original and primary mission did not negate the possibility of translating its call into specific political concerns. Perhaps, it was even necessary and inevitable to deconstruct the original message through the inspiration of the Spirit and apply it to a new and later historical context, relevant to contemporary concerns or social issues. Even the early church could not escape the political ramifications of its work and proved to be a political force on the grassroots level, leavening society with new values and representing a threat to the empire that the emperors were unable to stop. Eventually, the religion overtook the political order and established the Holy Roman Empire, displaying the inevitable relation between church and state, whether it acts wittingly or unwittingly to this end. This Special Issue of our journal displays this inevitable and decided influence.

Prof. Dr. Stephen Strehle
Dr. Joseph Prud'homme
Guest Editors

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• the relation between church and state
• the separation of church and state
• New Testament
• early church
• Catholicism
• Reformation
• Protestantism
• secularization
• Founding Fathers
• First Amendment