Church and State

Two Realms under One King, from the Martyrs to the First Amendment

Manny Pereira

Manny Pereira

9 min read

When the Pharisees asked whether it was lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, the Lord Jesus answered, “Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21). Before Pilate He confessed, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). Those two sayings mark out two realms, both under God, and neither meant to swallow the other. Much of the history of the church’s relation to the state is the history of forgetting one saying or the other.

For nearly three centuries the question hardly arose, because the state was the church’s persecutor. Then an emperor took up the cross as a battle standard, and for more than a thousand years church and realm were bound together in what came to be called Christendom. The Reformation loosened that knot without untying it. It was left largely to persecuted dissenters, first on the Continent and then in England and America, to insist that the magistrate bears no sword over the conscience.


A Persecuted Minority

The apostolic church owed Caesar honor, taxes, and prayers (Romans 13:1–7; 1 Timothy 2:1–2), but it owed him no worship. Rome was itself a sacral society, held together by common rites, and the Christians’ refusal to share those rites was treated as disloyalty to the empire. Under Decius in 250 every household was required to obtain a certificate that it had sacrificed to the gods and tasted the sacrificial meat. The “Great Persecution” under Diocletian followed in 303.1 The church of those centuries had no sword and asked for none. It grew by preaching, by holy living, and by the blood of its martyrs.

The Constantinian Turn

Everything changed with Constantine. After his victory at the Milvian Bridge on October 28, 312, he met his fellow emperor Licinius at Milan in January 313, and together they granted “both to the Christians and to all others full authority to follow whatever worship each person has desired.” The age of the martyrs was over. Yet, as David Wright observes, the toleration decreed at Milan “did not last long.”2 The church that had been tolerated soon became favored, and the favored church soon became the only lawful one. (See Constantinianism.)

On February 28, 380, Theodosius commanded that all his subjects follow the faith of Peter and take the name of Catholic Christians. Dissenters were to be “smitten first by divine vengeance and secondly by the retribution of our own initiative.”3 By 385, under the usurping emperor Maximus, a bishop accused of heresy (Priscillian) had been put to death at Trier, the first such blood shed by a ruler who called himself Christian.4

The church had not lost all its courage. When Theodosius ordered the massacre at Thessalonica in 390, Ambrose of Milan barred him from Communion until he had done public penance; the emperor, Ambrose held, was within the church, not above it.5 But the alliance itself went unquestioned. A generation earlier the Donatist bishop Donatus had asked, “What has the emperor to do with the church?” Augustine answered the Donatists by reading the parable of the great supper as a charter for coercion: “Compel them to come in” (Luke 14:23).6 For a thousand years that text would be quoted to justify the sword in matters of faith.

The Doctrine of the Two Swords

In 494 Pope Gelasius I wrote to the emperor Anastasius that the world is ruled by two powers, “the sacred authority of the priesthood and the royal power,” and that “of these the responsibility of the priests is more weighty.”7 The principle grew with the centuries. Charlemagne decreed that “all who stubbornly refuse Christian baptism shall be put to death.”8 In 1075 Gregory VII claimed the right to depose emperors, and in 1077 the emperor Henry IV submitted to him at Canossa in the quarrel over investiture.9

By the twelfth century the doctrine of the two swords, drawn from Luke 22:38, was “so old as to be unquestioned.” Both the spiritual and the material sword belonged to the church; the second was wielded by the soldier, but “at the orders of the priest.” The thirteenth-century jurist Philippe de Beaumanoir described how this worked in practice. The church examined and condemned the heretic, and then “the lay justice must then burn him, seeing that the spiritual justice ought not to put anyone to death.”10

Boniface VIII crowned the theory in the bull Unam Sanctam (1302): “it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” Dante, who placed Boniface in hell, saw the cost plainly: “Since the Church has sought to be two governments at once, she sinks in much, befouling both her power and ministry.”11

The Magisterial Reformers

The Reformers broke the papal claim over princes, but not the bond between church and realm. George H. Williams called them magisterial reformers because they carried out reform “in alliance with and undergirded by the coercive power of the magistrate.”12

Luther taught that God governs through two kingdoms. The spiritual government “has no sword, but it has the word”; the worldly government “works through the sword.” He warned that “the Devil himself never ceases cooking and brewing up the two kingdoms together.” Yet, as Timothy George cautions, Luther’s distinction must not be confused “with the modern separation of church and state.” The prince became an emergency bishop, and the Peace of Augsburg (1555) recognized “the religion of the prince as determinative for that of his subjects.”13

Zwingli went further. “A Christian city is nothing other than a Christian church,” he held, and in 1526 he persuaded the Zurich council to keep a baptismal register in every parish. Infant baptism thus became an instrument of civic conformity.14

Calvin labored for the church’s freedom to govern its own life. His Ecclesiastical Ordinances of 1541 placed discipline in the hands of the Consistory rather than the city council.15 Yet he still urged magistrates to be “nursing fathers” who would maintain religious uniformity, and in 1553 Geneva burned Michael Servetus.16

In England the Act of Supremacy (1534) declared Henry VIII “the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England.”17 The crown, not the pope, now ruled the church, but the church was still the realm at prayer.

The Radical Protest

The sharpest dissent came from the Reformers’ own students. The Swiss Brethren who rebaptized one another in Zurich on January 21, 1525, held that the church is a gathered company of believers and that the council had no right to govern it. The Schleitheim Confession (1527) drew the line plainly: “The sword is an ordering of God outside the perfection of Christ.”18 They called on the magistrate to stay out of the church, which was, in the words of Christian History, “a radical departure from an assumption practically unquestioned for more than a thousand years.”19

Christendom answered with fire and water. In April 1529 the Diet of Speyer revived the ancient Code of Justinian, which made rebaptism a capital crime, and Catholic and Protestant magistrates enforced it alike. Menno Simons answered that the true church suffers persecution but inflicts it on no one.20 Their refusal of all civil office and of every oath was an error that the Reformed confessions rightly answered. Their refusal to coerce conscience was a recovery of something the church had forgotten. Both sides of the ledger are set out on the Anabaptists page.

Liberty of Conscience

The English Baptists took up the plea for liberty without the Anabaptist withdrawal from public life. In 1612 Thomas Helwys told James I that the king, a mortal man, had no power over the immortal souls of his subjects (see The Particular Baptists). The Westminster Assembly, by contrast, still charged the magistrate to see “that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed.”21 Roger Williams answered in 1644:

God requires not a uniformity of religion to be enacted and enforced in any civil state; which enforced uniformity, sooner or later, is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravishing of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in his servants, and of the hypocrisy and destruction of millions of souls.22 Roger WilliamsThe Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, 1644

Banished from Massachusetts in 1635, Williams founded Providence and the colony of Rhode Island on the principle of religious freedom.23 New England was slow to follow. In 1651 the Baptist Obadiah Holmes was publicly whipped on Boston Common for holding a worship service in Massachusetts.24 In England the Act of Toleration of 1689 brought relief to Protestant Dissenters. That same year the Particular Baptists owned a confession declaring that “God alone is Lord of the conscience.”25 Unlike Westminster, it gave the magistrate no duty to suppress heresy.

The American Settlement

The principle came to its fullest civil expression in America, where Baptists were among its most persistent advocates. Isaac Backus, sent by the Warren Association in 1774 to plead before members of the Continental Congress, wrote in 1781 that “no man can be made a member of a truly religious society by force or without his own consent.”26 The Virginia itinerant John Leland put the matter memorably:

Persecution, like a lion, tears the saints to death, but leaves Christianity pure; state establishment of religion, like a bear, hugs the saints, but corrupts Christianity.27 John Leland

The First Amendment, ratified with the Bill of Rights on December 15, 1791, forbade Congress to establish religion or to prohibit its free exercise.28 On January 1, 1802, answering the Danbury Baptist Association, Thomas Jefferson described that amendment as building “a wall of separation between church and state.”29 The states moved more slowly; Massachusetts did not end its established church until 1833.

Lessons for Stewards

The magistrate is God’s servant, not the church’s. Paul calls the ruler “God’s servant” who “does not bear the sword in vain” (Romans 13:4). The sword is given for the punishment of evildoers. It was never given for the correction of conscience, which answers to God alone.

The church’s weapons are spiritual. “The weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds” (2 Corinthians 10:4). Every attempt to advance Christ’s kingdom with the civil sword has wounded the church that made it.

Separation is not secularism. To separate the church from the state is not to separate God from public life. Magistrates remain accountable to the King of kings, and Christians may lawfully serve as magistrates.30 The Baptists who pleaded for liberty did not ask for a society without religion. They asked for a church without coercion.

When the two collide, Christ must be obeyed. “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). The martyrs of every age, from the arena to the Limmat to Smithfield, bore witness that Christ is King over both realms, and that He rules them by different means: the church by His Word and Spirit, and the state by the sword He has lent it.

The church is a stewardship, not a department of government. Its glory is not in the favor of princes but in the presence of its Lord, who said, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18).

Read More

Constantinianism
How the church and the empire were first joined.

The Anabaptists
The first advocates of a free church, and where they erred.

The Particular Baptists
Helwys, the confessions, and the plea for liberty of conscience.


The Church   Church Polity and Politics

Notes

  1. Manny Pereira, “Baptist Church History Notes,” Part 2 (slides on sacralism and the Decian certificate); Christian History 28, “The 100 Most Important Events in Church History” (1990), timeline, A.D. 250 and 303. ↩
  2. David F. Wright, “The Edict of Milan (313),” in Christian History 28, “The 100 Most Important Events in Church History” (1990), quoting the rescript of Licinius. ↩
  3. The Theodosian Code 16.1.2, as quoted in Manny Pereira, “Baptist Church History Notes,” Part 2. ↩
  4. Manny Pereira, “Baptist Church History Notes,” Part 2. The notes give the date and the ruler; Priscillian is the man executed. ↩
  5. Manny Pereira, “Baptist Church History Notes,” Part 2, on Ambrose and Theodosius; Christian History 28, “The 100 Most Important Events in Church History” (1990), timeline, A.D. 390. ↩
  6. On Donatus, see Optatus of Milevis, Against the Donatists 3.3. On Augustine’s use of Luke 14:23, see Leonard Verduin, The Reformers and Their Stepchildren (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), ch. 2, quoting Augustine’s sermons and De Correctione Donatistorum. ↩
  7. Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), ch. 2, “The Thirst for God.” ↩
  8. Leonard Verduin, The Reformers and Their Stepchildren (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), ch. 2. ↩
  9. Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), ch. 2, on the Dictatus Papae; Christian History 28, “The 100 Most Important Events in Church History” (1990), timeline, A.D. 1077 and 1122. ↩
  10. Leonard Verduin, The Reformers and Their Stepchildren (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), ch. 1. The two-swords formula is quoted there without attribution; it is usually traced to Bernard of Clairvaux. ↩
  11. Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), ch. 2. ↩
  12. Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), ch. 3, “Martin Luther.” ↩
  13. Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), ch. 3. ↩
  14. Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), ch. 4, “Huldrych Zwingli.” ↩
  15. David W. Hall, Calvin in the Public Square: Liberal Democracies, Rights, and Civil Liberties (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2009), ch. 2, “John Calvin: A Biography for a Political Figure.” ↩
  16. Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), chs. 5 and 6. ↩
  17. Christian History 28, “The 100 Most Important Events in Church History” (1990), “The Act of Supremacy (1534).” ↩
  18. The Schleitheim Confession (1527), art. 6. ↩
  19. Christian History, “The Radical Reformation: The Anabaptists” (1985), “Conflict with the State.” ↩
  20. Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), ch. 6, “Menno Simons.” ↩
  21. Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), 23.3. ↩
  22. Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644), as quoted in Christian History, “The Baptists” (1985), “Religious Liberty—An Emotional Issue Still Not Settled.” ↩
  23. Christian History, “The Baptists” (1985), “Roger Williams.” ↩
  24. Christian History, “The Baptists” (1985), “Obadiah Holmes.” ↩
  25. Second London Confession (1677/1689), 21.2. ↩
  26. Christian History, “The Baptists” (1985), “Baptist Distinctives” and “Isaac Backus.” ↩
  27. John Leland, quoted in Edwin S. Gaustad, “Where Are the Lions When We Really Need Them?” in Christian History, “The Baptists” (1985). ↩
  28. David W. Hall, Calvin in the Public Square: Liberal Democracies, Rights, and Civil Liberties (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2009), ch. 7. ↩
  29. Library of Congress, “Religion and the Founding of the American Republic: Jefferson’s Letter to the Danbury Baptists.” ↩
  30. Second London Confession, 24.1–2. ↩

Sources

  • Christian History. “The 100 Most Important Events in Church History.” Issue 28 (1990).
  • Christian History. “The Baptists.” (1985).
  • Christian History. “The Radical Reformation: The Anabaptists.” (1985).
  • George, Timothy. Theology of the Reformers. Rev. ed. Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013.
  • Hall, David W. Calvin in the Public Square: Liberal Democracies, Rights, and Civil Liberties. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2009.
  • Pereira, Manny. “Baptist Church History Notes,” Parts 1–4, with accompanying slides (teaching notes).
  • Verduin, Leonard. The Reformers and Their Stepchildren. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964.
  • The Schleitheim Confession (1527), The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), and The Second London Confession of Faith (1677/1689), as published on this site.