REPORT OF THE CHURCH/STATE SUBCOMMITTEE

[15th General Assembly (1987), Appendix Q, page 429ff.]  

NOTE:   The following positions of the Church/State Committee were received for information and study but not adopted by the 15th General Assembly.

I. PREAMBLE TO THE CHURCH/STATE SUBCOMMITTEE REPORT
TO THE PCA GENERAL ASSEMBLY
BIBLICAL, HISTORICAL, AND CONTEMPORARY CONCEPTS OF CHURCH/STATE RELATIONS.
by Douglas Kelly.

[M15GA, Appendix Q, pp. 432-442]

Over the past 3 or 4 years, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America has received a number of overtures from various Presbyteries asking for guidance in dealing with actual or potential difficulties in church/state relationships. These concerns range from whether the denomination should remain an incorporated body, what should be the response of churches to F.I.C.A., property, and other forms of civil taxation, what are the rights of parents and churches to educate their own children as they see fit, to such matters as the propriety of Christian resistance to unjust governmental policies such as the legalization of abortion.  These and other concerns have caused the General Assembly to set up a special subcommittee on Church/State relationships.

Your committee, made up of both ruling and teaching elders—including some attorneys at law—has been studying these matters carefully for nearly a year in order to bring you this report.  Before we can offer specific guidance on our contemporary difficulties, we must first briefly consider the Biblical and historical background.  We may consider both principially and practically our current church/state problems and possible responses.

I. Biblical and Theological Background of God, man and government.
The Bible begins with the greatest reality of all: God.  Everything that can be said about man and society, life, structure and order ultimately flows from and depends upon who God is.  Old and New Testaments reveal that God is an infinite Person; indeed, He is the one, true God, eternally existing in three Persons:  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  This God, out of his sovereign plan and good pleasure, created the world-and all reality—out of nothing, and gave it the structures and principles of energy and activity that He wished it to have.  As the crowning work of creation, God created man-male and female—in his own image, with dominion over the creatures.  Man, though finite, is like God in that he has personality and is made to reflect God’s personality (e.g. His holiness and love) in his individual life and social relationships of every kind.
 
Only God has sovereign, unlimited power, but He gave man to share His power in a limited and structured way as His image-bearer.  From the very beginning, man has been involved in a definite power (or authority) structure.  God has total authority overall and humankind has limited authority under God.  The male has a certain limited authority under God.  The male has a certain limited authority over his wife, the parents over the children, and human beings over the animals and natural environment.  In other words, God’s authority which He imparted to man was first of all mediated through the structure of the family.  The family was in a sense the first school, the first church, the first farm and factory, and the first state.  Man was responsible to live his life and thus to exercise power through these structures in a way that was in accordance with the character of God in whose image he was created.

The tragic coming of sin into the world negatively and drastically affected individual and corporate man in all of his relationships, but it did not remove the essential structures by which man was to live his life and exercise the power that was necessary to do so.  We may summarize the outward effects of these sin-altered relationships by saying that parents were given the rod and the state was given the sword to maintain order and make the living of life possible in a fallen world.  The final effects of sin issue not merely in the rod and the sword, but in the unspeakable horror of death and hell.

But Scripture reveals that God not merely limits the effects of sin during this earthly life via the rod and sword and finally punishes it in outer darkness, but more importantly, out of His sheer grace and love He has provided a way—in accordance with an eternal plan—for multitudes of sinful humanity to be redeemed.  And so from the time of our first father Adam's fall, God has made gracious promises of salvation to man and has called humanity into a new relationship with Himself that we traditionally call the Covenant of Grace.

Just as God provided a structure through which what we might call “civil” aspects of human relationships might be carried on in terms of orderly and limited power, even so He provided a structure through which the gracious, redemptive aspects of divine/human, and human/human relationships could flow.  This structure or sphere of power and authority is the church or people of God in both its Old and New Testament aspects.  Put in another way, the Bible teaches that both state and church are ordained by God with legitimate and limited authority for the structuring of man’s life.

Now the concern of our committee has not been so much with the redemptive structure and ministry of the church as it is with the relationship of the church to an institution of equally divine ordination: the state.  On the basis of the preceding theological context of church and state in light of who God is and what His plan is, we may draw some preliminary conclusions about how the structures of church and state are intended to function.

First we note that only God is sovereign and only God has absolute and unlimited power.  Man, in the image of God, does have power and authority, but since man is finite and limited, his authority and power, whether he exercises it individually or through the structures of the church, state, family, or school is finite and limited in terms of who God is and what God’s plan for man is.  Thus the exercise of all human power of every sort (whether individual, family, school, church, or state) is defined and limited by virtue of the agents (who man is and who God is) and by virtue of the relationship between them (which we may term “covenant” or divinely-instituted relationship;   whether  the  creation  relationship  with  all  men,   sometimes  called “Covenant of Works” or the redemptive relationship with the elect, usually called “Covenant of Grace”).

To carry this matter further, we must look at the inherent limitations of legitimate state power and the ramifications of this for its relationship to the church.  On the one hand, Scripture teaches the necessity for all men in general and for Christians in particular to be in subjection to the authority of the civil government or state.  Christ says: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matt. 22:21).  Whatever else this may entail, it certainly means that the legitimate authority of the state (or Caesar) is not absolute; it is limited in respect to what is owed to God.  Romans 13, which speaks of civil rulers as ordained ministers of God to whom every soul is to be subject, also specifies the goals for which these ministers are granted power: to be a terror to evil, to give praise to good works, and to revenge wrath upon those who do evil.  Thus the state which is carrying out these goals is acting in terms of legitimate, divinely given authority, and is to be unreservedly submitted to for conscience’s sake.  H. C. G. Moule summarizes both sides of the equation:

Yet both Biblical and secular history teach that there are many times in which civil authorities no longer act in terms of the divinely given goals of state power and indeed pervert the very ends of government by commanding men to do what God forbids.  What then is the Biblical teaching on the appropriate response of the believer when the civil government seriously overlaps its limits?

The Calvinist tradition sees civil governments as well as individual citizens under covenant obligations to God.  The powers of civil authorities and governmental structures are therefore specifically limited by God’s transcendent, covenantal requirements upon all human governing authorities.  If and when those civil authorities flagrantly transgress their divinely ordained limitations, then the people of God are honor-bound to resist them.

The famous 17th century Scottish Calvinist scholar and statesman, Samuel Rutherford, explains it this way:

In other words, Rutherford does not interpret the expression “higher powers” (of Rom. 13:1) in absolutist terms.  If a civil magistrate consistently abuses his position contrary to the limitations placed on him by the transcendent law of the Creator, then Christians have the right and duty to unseat him or indeed, an entire civil order (under extreme conditions).  That is, a king or government by flagrantly violating the basic moral law can turn themselves from a “higher power” into a “lower power”.

Underlying the resistance theory of Rutherford and his Scottish, English, and American successors are at least two important assumptions about the nature of government itself and about the balance between sovereignty and responsibility.  First, because all men are created in the image of God, the powers of human government are never absolute: rather, they are limited by the nature of God, man, and the various covenants between them, covenant relationships which are rooted in the very structure
of man and nature:

The very nature of man as creature in the image of Almighty God, in the traditional Reformed view, means that a people never have even the right to give away their liberty to any governmental order:

In answer to the argument that in the providence of God, the people of a land have been placed under a certain government, and therefore, are morally obliged to accept it, even if it is tyrannical, Rutherford states:

This sort of argumentation (in a less explicitly theological form) was taken up and developed by John Locke, and served as an inspiration and apology for both the
1688 Glorious Revolution in England (under the claim that James II had broken the covenant which allowed the people to change governments), and the 1776 American Revolution (under the claim that King George in had broken his covenant with the colonies which allowed them to set up a new form of government).  Closely related to this implied “natural” covenant idea, is another theological assumption which has strengthened the hearts and hands of Calvinists in overturning hostile governments: the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man are always to be held together and to be acted upon in the great issues of life and government.

From this viewpoint, the claim traditionally advanced by many sincere Christians that the sovereignty of God has set up even the most wicked governments, and therefore the appropriate response of the persecuted believer is passively to suffer (since it is after all, willed by the God who “ordains higher powers”) constitutes a failure to adhere to the Biblical balance between divine sovereignty and human responsibility.  Rutherford specifically disputes the claim that the sovereignty of God precludes believers from any action against an unjust government other than “tears and prayers”:

Some three centuries after Rutherford, the Southern Presbyterian theologian, Robert L. Dabney, points to the important balance which is needed between God’s ordaining sovereignty and man’s intelligent responsibility in these difficult governmental matters:

We may summarize therefore the Biblical balance between legitimate submission to state power and the necessary maintenance of individual liberty under God by remembering that the power of the state to which believers are required to submit is not absolute, but is limited in terms of divinely imposed covenant and in terms of man’s inherent obligation to use intelligent means to reach proper ends.  These Biblical limitations then to state authority have given man an inalienable dignity and liberty which has asserted itself again and again in the overthrow of tyrants and the support of true rulers.

We must now in the second place look at the impact of the biblical heritage on our own Western historical background in order to see who we are, how we got here, and thus how we are to interpret what is happening in our present society.

II.  Historical Background of our Contemporary Church/State Context
While our committee wishes to speak in terms of general principles which will apply to all countries, particularly to those nations where the Presbyterian Church in America has missionaries, we must at the same time devote some attention to the current situation in the United States since so many of our Presbytery overtures deal with the problems that are occurring here.

It would be inappropriate and impossible in this report to give even a superficial outline of what has happened in the realm of church/state relations between the close of the New Testament period and our own day.  Nevertheless, we must attempt to hit a few high spots—with an apology for the selective nature of the exercise.

Any responsible discussion of church/state relations in this country must start with the fact that Americans are, culturally at least, transplanted Europeans: indeed, Northwestern Europeans (for the most part) who come from a centuries old Christianized cultural background. The fact that we come from a more than millennial old Christian cultural context rather than from an Islamic, Buddhist, or French Revolution secularist background is of utmost importance in properly interpreting who we are and how our civil and ecclesiastical structures function.

After over two centuries of persecution of Christianity by the Roman State, the Emperor Constantine was converted to the faith and began the process of making Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.  As this process continued, there was a movement to Christianize the great law codes of the Roman (and Byzantine) traditions, as seen in such Biblically influenced codifications of civil legislation as the Theodosian and Justinian Codes, which gave protection to the family, regularized inheritance and usury, outlawed perversion, etc.  After the Fall of Rome and the rise of European feudal states and then monarchies, the influence of the Bible with its view of limited human governmental power was very strong by way of church canon law as it interfaced with local and national customary law.

As central state claimed more power and control over the populace under various monarchs, the Christian people of Western Europe from time to time reasserted their historic Biblically based liberties through such movements and instruments as the Spanish and English Magnae Chartae.  Absolutist monarchs and a would-be all-powerful papacy were continually stymied by the Common Law legacy of Biblically-based, Covenant insured freedom of the people (within certain limits).  The Reformation and Puritan periods have long been studied in these very terms—of the reassertion of Biblical liberty of thought and life over illegitimate, absolutist centralized authority.

The initial settlement of the United States came of course during the Puritan Period in the early 1700’s, as a consequence of the English Middle Class's struggle for Biblical, Common Law liberty against a church/state establishment which had arrogated to itself powers far beyond legitimate covenant bounds.

Most of the American colonies had official charters which specified their Biblically based liberties (at least, in general), and by the time of the American Revolution in 1776, nine of the thirteen original states had established state churches. By this time however American life was marked by a variety of different denominations and sects so that the desire was widespread to disestablish the Anglican and Congregational Churches in favor of “a free church in a free state”.  There was very little desire though to separate the state (i.e. the new national government) from Christianity itself; but rather from particular denominational hierarchies.

This is the background to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which guarantees that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof....” Robert L. Cord, an acknowledged expert on the history of the First Amendment, concludes that it was intended to accomplish three purposes:

First, it was intended to prevent the establishment of a national church or religion, or the giving of any religious sect or denomination a preferred status.  Second, it was designed to safeguard the right of freedom of conscience in religious beliefs against invasion by the national Government.  Third, it was so constructed in order to allow the States, unimpeded, to deal with religious establishments and to aid to religious institutions as they saw fit.  There appears to be no historical evidence that the First Amendment was intended to preclude Federal governmental aid to religion when it was provided on a nondiscriminatory basis.  Nor does there appear to be any historical evidence that the First Amendment was intended to provide an absolute separation or independence of religion and the national state.  The actions of the early Congresses and Presidents, in fact, suggest quite the opposite.[10]

Until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the American courts largely proceeded on the assumption that while America had no established or favored denomination, still the basics of Christian morality were part and parcel of the Common Law.[11]  Based on a study of judicial cases all through the 19th century, William George Torpey has noted:

By the period of the War Between the States, powerful secularizing trends were abroad in America which would by and by deeply affect the relationship between the civil and ecclesiastical structures of the nation.  Some aspects of our contemporary church/state problems would later arise as a by-product of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which applied various aspects of the Bill of Rights (originally intended for the Federal Government) to the actual State governments.  For instance, the alleged “tension” between the two clauses of the First Amendment ( (a) Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion and (b) or prohibiting the free exercise thereof) is traced, in part, by Justice William Rehnquist to this very source:”. . . Second, the decision by this court that the First Amendment was “incorporated” into the Fourteenth Amendment and thereby made applicable against the States . . . similarly multiplied the number of instances in which this ‘tension’ might arise.. .”[13]

More significant than this however was the general post-Civil War tendency for the turning of the United States from a (relatively) Christian-based constitutional Republic into a (relatively) secularized central Democracy.  The Fourteenth Amendment is merely a part of this latter movement in American history.  While we cannot examine the details of this secularizing tendency, we must glance at a few of its most important judicial results insofar as these impact current church/state relations.

If Robert L. Cord is correct, then 1947 is a pivotal year in reaping the results of a changing and more hostile relationship of state to church in America:

In this case, the Court dealt with the controversial question of the right of New Jersey authorities to send Catholic children to parochial school on public school buses
(or to reimburse their parents for the equivalent expense).  While this right was in fact upheld by the Court, Cord suggests that the way the decision was written was out of line with the traditionally friendly relationship between the American Republic and its
various churches:

Without going into the details of the judicial decisions that have followed the nearly four decades after Everson, we may simply note that an originally friendly
(though cautious, non-discriminatory, non-sectarian) relationship to Christianity on the part of the State has increasingly turned into what is at times a strongly confrontational,
if not openly hostile relationship, that appears to be marked by a growing tendency of
the secularized state to attempt to control many aspects of the formerly free life of the church.

The Everson case would seem to be merely one illustration of a radically different principle of interpretation of the U.S. Constitution on the part of the Supreme Court.  Contemporary legal scholars such as Professors Herbert W. Titus[16] and John Brabner-Smith[17] have argued that much of the increasing restriction on church and religious freedom since the time of Everson by the American judiciary is the end result
of an evolutionary view of law and language according to which “constitutional
language is fluid and malleable” rather than of absolute and fixed meaning, so that the Court can shift its interpretations of the First Amendment to fit the perceived contemporary political consensus of the national majority.  This leads us to our third major section.

III.          Current Church/State Problems and Possible Christian Responses
In a recent doctoral dissertation written for the University of Oregon on these problems, Steven Samson takes us a step beyond the merely negative procedure of Everson to an even more serious development in the attitude of some departments of the civil government towards the freedom of the church:

This is the type of thing that has caused so many overtures to be sent up to the General Assembly of our Church in recent years.  The Conference on Government Intervention in Religious Affairs, held in 1982 in Washington, D.C., listed a number of contemporary areas where the secular state seems to be trespassing on traditional “free exercise” rights of the church:

Professor of Law, Carl Esbeck, addresses the question of why there is this attempt on the part of the state to restrict the activities and rights of the church basically to worship and sacraments:

In a word, the ultimate cause of our current church/state problems lies in a deep shifting of moral and theological values in America that has been occurring for more than a century, and that has picked up great impetus since the 1960's.  Steven Samson
has stated it in these words:

In accordance with the Scriptural principles that “judgment begins in the house of God” and “Woe to them that dwell at ease in Zion,” we will not be far wrong to assume that secularist hostility to the church on the part of various departments of state could not have gained the power it has, if the church had not lost much of its faith in God and His Word as well as losing much of its cultural vitality during the last century and a half.  The aphorism of James Hitchcock is not comforting, that “in practice an orthodoxy which loses its authority has trouble even retaining the right of toleration.”[23]

Many of us believe that there has been a turning away from secularism and back to vital, evangelical Christianity within the United States since the early 1970’s on the part of multitudes of individuals and many denominational groups, of which the Presbyterian Church in America is a part.  While this evangelical trend may hearten us as believers, it is profoundly disturbing to dedicated secularists (in and out of civil government) who see it as a halting of a positive evolutionary trend towards democratic secularism.  Thus, we may realistically be prepared for even more confrontations between church and state during the final years of this century.

The far-seeing British historian, Christopher Dawson, wrote in 1940 words that seem prophetic: “The modern state is daily extending its control over a wider area of social life and is taking over functions that were formerly regarded as the province of independent social units, such as the family and the church, or as a sphere for the voluntary activities of private individuals.”[24]

Before we offer the specific responses of the committee to the four major problems that have been brought before us, let us say a brief word concerning how our local congregations and presbyteries might inform and educate their people on these issues in the future.  First, we trust that sessions might make a study of this committee report with the hope that it might in some way clarify their understanding of the nature of the contemporary church/state conflict so they may be better able to guide their people in these areas in days ahead.  Secondly, we earnestly encourage a great deal of specific prayer by churches and individuals on such matters as proper ways to protest abortion, appropriate changes in tax legislation, freedom of Christian schools and ministries, beneficial changes in the curriculum of public schools, and a general renewal of the spiritual condition of the nation.

Thirdly, we encourage sessions and perhaps appropriate committees of presbyteries to think of how they may keep themselves informed on vital church/state issues and also of what means or programs they may use to educate their congregations and Sunday schools on such portions of these subjects as they may deem appropriate.  Our committee would suggest such resources as World magazine (published weekly by The Presbyterian Journal), or The Religious Freedom Reporter of the Christian Legal Society (P.O. Box 1492, Merrifield, VA 22116), or “Gammon & Grange Non-Profit, Religious Liberties Newsletter”, (Gammon & Grange Law Offices, Suite 300, 1925 “K” Street N.W., Washington, DC 20006) in order to keep the church abreast of important relevant events.  Various helpful books and films are available on the history and contemporary status of religious and constitutional liberty in the western world.  It might be useful to study some of these resources.

Endnotes:
[1]  Handley C. G. Moule, The Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, ed. W. Robertson Nicoll, The Expositor’s Bible, Vol. V (Hartford: The S. S. Scranton Co.), p. 354.
[2] Samuel Rutherford, Lex, Rex (Sprinkle Publications: Harrisonburg, VA, 1980, reprint), p. 141.
[3] Ibid., pp. 144,145
[4] Ibid., pp. 59,60.
[5] Ibid., p. 31.
[6] Ibid., p. 66.
[7] Ibid., pp, 81,82,83.
[8] Ibid., p. 84.
[9] Robert L.   Dabney,   Systematic  Theology   (Richmond,  VA:   Presbyterian  Committee  of Publication, 1871), p. 872.
[10] Robert L. Cord, Separation of Church and State: Historical Fact and Current Fiction (Lambeth Press: New York, 1982), p. 15.  A very different view from Cord is presented by Thomas J. Curry, The First Freedoms:  Church and State in America to the Passage of The First Amendment (Oxford University Press, 1986).  Other important contemporary volumes which should be studied on this issue are: James McClellan, Joseph Story and the American Constitution, 1971; an article by McClellan—“The
Making and Unmaking of the Establishment Clause”, in A Blueprint for Judicial Reform, 1981.  See also: F. O’Brien, Justice Reed and the First Amendment, 1958; Charles Fairman, an article—“Does the Fourteenth Amendment Incorporate the Bill of Rights?”, in Stanford Law Review, vol. 2, pp. 5ff., 1949; Michael Malvin, Religion and Politics, The Intentions of the Authors of the First Amendment, 1978.
[11] In 1892 the Supreme Court of the United States, after reviewing the entire history of America, concluded that “this is a Christian nation” in Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 142 U.S. 457, 471 (1891).  Justice Joseph Story, renowned commentator on the American Constitution, stated: “One of the beautiful boasts of our municipal jurisprudence is, that Christianity is a part of the Common Law, from which it seeks the sanctions of its rights, and by which it endeavors to regulate its doctrines.... There has never been a period in which the Common Law did not recognize Christianity as lying at its foundations” (see Story, “Discourse Pronounced Upon the Inauguration of the Author As Dane Professor of Law in Harvard University. August 25th, 1829,” reprinted in The Legal Mind in America, Perry Miller, ed., 1962, p. 178.)
[12] William George Torpey, Judicial Doctrines of Religious Rights in America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1948), p. 31.
[13] William Rehnquist in Thomas v. Review Board of the Indiana Employment Security Division, 450 U.S. 707 (1981), quoted in Steven Alan Samson, Crossed Swords: Entanglements Between Church and State in America, University of Oregon, Ph.D., 1984 (University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, MI), p. 376.
[14] Cord, op. cit, p. 109.
[15] Ibid., pp. 112, 113,114. Underlying Dr. Cord’s argument against current Supreme Court policy is the view that the Constitution actually allows government support of religion-in-general, but bars preferential treatment of one denomination over another.  This historical viewpoint is labeled by Professor Carl Esbeck “non-preferentialist”.  Esbeck lists four other widely held viewpoints on the true constitutional relationship between church and slate in America: “strict-separationist”—religion is private and individualistic, and should have little or no influence on public affairs, and the church should have no ontological status before the law; “pluralistic-separationist”—the state is said to be neutral toward religion and a strong dichotomy is drawn between secular and religious; there is no transcendent point of reference for judging the state, but churches do have institutional rights; “institutional-separationist”—much like the former except that they do admit a transcendent world view (based on Judeo-Christian thought) which can judge the state; and finally, “restorationists”—who feel that a “neutral” state is impossible so that the state should be confessionally Christian, though protecting religious-based conscience and refraining from coercion against non-believers.  See Carl H. Esbeck, “The Five Predominant Theories of Church-State Relations In Contemporary American Thought,” For Presentation at the Thirty-Eighth National Conference of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, “Church, States and the Law,” September 18-20, 1985, Washington, D.C.
[16] See Herbert W. Titus, “Religious Freedom:  The War Between Two Faiths,” (CBN University, Virginia Beach, VA 23464, 1983), and Titus, “Education, Caesar’s or God’s: A Constitutional Question of Jurisdiction,” (Journal of Christian Jurisprudence).
[17] John Brabner-Smith, The Laws of Nature:  The Relationship of Science, Theology and Philosophy in the Field of Law including The Effect of Physical Science Theories on the Laws of the United States (Volume Two in Law for Layman Series, 1984).
[18] Samson, op. cit., p. S40.
[19] Dean M. Kelley, “Religious Freedom: The Developing Pattern of Restriction,” in Freedom and Faith: The Impact of Law on Religious Liberty, ed. Lynn R. Buzzard (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books,
1982), pp. 82,83.
[20] Allan C. Carlson, "Regulators and Religion: Caesar’s Revenge," Regulation, May/June 1979, p. 27. [21] Carl H. Esbeck, “Toward A General Theory of Church-State Relations and the First Amendment,” Public Law Forum, Vol. IV, No. n, 1985, pp. 328, 329.  The important point of the jurisdiction or structural (i.e. “non-derived” from personal liberties) rights of the church is carefully argued in an Amicus Curiae brief of the Rutherford Institute in the Supreme Court Case, October Term, 1985, Ohio Civil Rights Commission v. Dayton Christian Schools, Appeal from the Sixth Court of Appeals (The Rutherford Institute, Manassas, Virginia 22110).
[22] Samson, op. cit., p. 536.
[23] James Hitchcock, "Competing Ethical Systems," Imprimis, April, 1981, p. 2.
[24] C. Dawson, Religion and the Modern State (1940), p. 45.