Church and State

Acts 25:11 “If then I am a wrongdoer and have committed anything for which I deserve to die, I do not seek to escape death. But if there is nothing to their charges against me, no one can give me up to them. I appeal to Caesar”.

Having noted that the Old Testament suggests a division of labor between the church and state, and having seen that the New Testament explicitly gives the use of the sword to the state, it is now time for us to consider the church-state relationship more closely. To be sure, this can be a complicated issue, but there are conclusions we can draw based on the New Testament’s division of labor and how the Apostles interacted with the pagan state of Rome.

The Westminster Confession of Faith of 1847 tells us, “It is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the church of our common Lord, without giving the preference to any denomination of Christians above the rest, in such a manner that all ecclesiastical persons whatever shall enjoy the full, free, and unquestioned liberty of discharging every part of their sacred functions, without violence or danger”. Here we find a logical conclusion from the state’s duty to bear the sword, for if the state is to punish evildoers, our churches may reasonably expect the state to respond when thieves, slanderers, murderers, and others attack churches and Christians. In other words, it is not wrong for the church to appeal to the state in matters of common justice. Within the church, however, 1 Corinthians 6:1–8 states that Christians should strive to settle disagreements between one another without involving the state insofar as their arguments do not involve matters related to civic crimes and the common good. That Christians may legitimately appeal to the state for protection and for justice is seen in Acts 25:1–12, where Paul exercises his right as a Roman citizen to appeal to the emperor to hear his case. Of course, any time we appeal to the state, we risk the state’s getting too involved in religious matters, so we must be wise in our dealings with the civil magistrate. Still, the state does have as its duty the protection of all its citizens, even the church and its members.

The state should not prefer one denomination of Christians above others. There should be no state-established and state-run church, for this would violate the church-state division of labor. Christ gives to the church alone the power to discipline, to bind and loose in spiritual matters. A state that prefers one denomination over another has made a theological judgment it is not called to make. America’s Founders strongly believed that there should be no national church denomination, as they had experienced in England.

The phrase “separation of Church and State” cannot be found in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. In fact, it is not found in any of our nation’s founding documents. Related to government, the phrase first appeared in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut in 1801.The Danbury Baptists wrote Thomas Jefferson expressing their concern that the government might try to regulate their religious expression. In response, Jefferson wrote his now famous letter, using the phrase “Separation of Church and State” to reassure the Danbury Baptists that the First Amendment prohibited the government from trying to control religious expression. In short, the First Amendment was intended to keep government out of regulating religion, but it did not keep religion out of government or the public square. They codified this belief in the First Amendment, keeping the federal government out of the affairs of the church, and of its members. But in recent decades, this idea has been twisted into the so-called “separation of church and state,” a phrase that appears nowhere in the United States Constitution. Anytime you hear the concept of the separation of church and state being talked about these days, it is never in regard to maintaining the restraints on government; instead, it is always talking about what Christians and churches cannot do.