Reinforcing the Wall between Church and State

Third in a Series on the Church in Politics

When the power of the Roman Empire began to decline in Italy and Western Europe after the transfer of the capital to Constantinople in A.D. 330, the church and especially the bishop of Rome moved into the vacated sphere of influence. The bishops of the church had begun to act as civil judges during the days of Constantine. Because they were more just and more efficient than most of the secular judges, their popularity increased. More and more cases were taken to them. The ecclesiastical taste for influence in civil affairs grew, and in the middle of the fifth century it was Pope Leo I who saved Rome from capture by the Huns under Attila and mitigated the terrors of the Vandal capture. The pope was engaged in civil affairs.

The symbolism of what was to come was acted out by a relatively weak pope, Leo III, when on Christmas day in 800 he placed upon the head of Charlemagne a crown of empire and inaugurated the Holy Roman Empire of the West. Charlemagne did not acknowledge that he had instigated the pope’s act in any way. The conclusion was unavoidable that the officer at the head of the church administration was conferring civil authority and power upon the ruler of the state.

Only sixty-five years later, Pope Nicholas I wrote to the emperor in Constantinople a letter breathing rebuke and contempt. In it he stressed that the bishop of Rome was the ultimate court of civil appeal in all of Christendom.

This claim to dominance was set forth much more clearly by the extremely able and dedicated Pope Gregory VII. Gregory served the ecclesiastical administration in Rome for many years under a number of popes before he himself obtained the office. He was convinced that the church could do its work properly only if it were free of interference from the civil state. He wanted to stop civil rulers from making appointments to church offices and from using their influence to dictate to church officials who should be appointed.

Gregory summed up these ideas for his own use in a remarkable series of propositions, among which are these:

That he [the pope] alone may use the imperial insignia; that all princes should kiss his feet, and his alone; that he may depose emperors; that he may absolve the subjects of wicked rulers from their allegiance.

At this point we are a long way from the separation of spheres under Moses and Aaron. We are also a long way from the days when the state was attempting to crush varying opinions in the church and to direct its theology. The pope is now sitting upon the circle of the earth as the vicegerent of God. He is determined to control all activity, civil or religious, political or ecclesiastical, and to bend it to the performance of his wishes.

To further this plan Gregory declared early in 1076 that the emperor, Henry IV, was no longer the governor of the German and Italian empire over which he had ruled. His subjects were not only released from the obligation of obedience; they were forbidden to obey him.

In this action Gregory, the officer who ruled the church, was claiming to rule the state also. Unfortunately for his personal prestige, he was a sincere and honest man, despite his espousal of this false political philosophy. Sincerity and honesty in so bad a cause came to a poor end. Henry put on a very impressive show of repentence, and Gregory, as a shepherd of souls dealing with apparently genuine penitence, restored him to good standing in the church. Thus the pope’s attempt to control the empire failed.

But the claims of the church did not lessen. They rose to their greatest height under Pope Innocent III. As the great English medievalist Margaret Deanesly says, Innocent was “a greater force in the secular politics of Europe than either emperor or national king.” It was he who forced King John of England to make England a papal fief. And it was he who deposed one emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in favor of another. Papal temporal authority reached its peak with Innocent.

His successors did not moderate the claim but found themselves less able to exercise it. Innocent had expressed his idea very effectively in a simile: “As the moon derives its light from the sun … so the power of the King derives the splendor of its dignity from the authority of the Pope.” Not only did he force temporal sovereigns to obey him; he also gave them orders. He told crusaders whom to fight and whom not to fight. In 1204 the new Latin emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin, was informed that with the aid of the Roman see he would be able to retain his dominion but that he would lose it if he failed to obey the pope.

But Pope Boniface VIII, when he tried to make good the same claims a century later, found himself in a very thunderous atmosphere. The barons of England refused to admit that either England or Scotland was a papal fief. Boniface’s dealings with Philip IV of France led directly to the pope’s death, for Philip was even more brusque and violent than Edward of England in rejecting the pope’s claims.

One of the most remarkable documents of all time dealing with the church-state relationship was given to the public in 1324. Its title was Defender of Peace, its author Marsiglius of Padua, a former rector of the University of Paris. Marsiglius was forthright and definite in rejecting the whole medieval system of the temporal claims of the papacy. No bishop, Roman or other, might subject anyone to temporal penalties apart from the permission of the body of citizens. Marsiglius put the authority of the civil state into the hands of its people. This view, though at that time far ahead of the possibility of realization, held great promise for the future. Marsiglius wanted the church to return to apostolic poverty. Temporal power was the last thing it should have, he believed.

Perhaps the last effective exercise of the papacy’s temporal power on the grand scale was the bull issued in 1493 by Alexander VI, one of the most unworthy occupants of the papal throne. This bull “by the authority of Almighty God … and of the Vicariate of Jesus Christ” granted sovereignty to Spain over all the lands to be discovered beyond a line drawn north and south through a point one hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands.

On the eve of the Protestant Reformation, then, no modification of the temporal authority of the church was contemplated.

Martin Luther’s ideas on this matter were entirely different from those of Alexander VI. He reacted strongly against the papal procedures and followed the line of thinking that Wyclif had begun to defend in England in the fourteenth Century. Both civil and ecclesiastical dominion come from God. The existing church, because of its evil character, deserved no dominion at all, certainly none over the state. Wyclif presumably would have had the state reform the church. Luther was forced to entrust the organizational reform of the church to the civil government of the local state for lack of a better authority. But he conceived of this as temporary and without principal foundation. The theologians of Lutheran orthodoxy developed, however, a willingness to permit the state to determine the faith that was to rule the teaching and worship of the church within its borders. The proper situation was not restored in Lutheranism until American Lutherans built their churches in the United States on the principle of separation. The state did not supervise the church, nor did the church attempt to order the state.

The great pioneers of the view that the state should leave the church to develop without civil guidance were the Anabaptists, who began to present their ideas in Zürich in Zwingli’s day. Their gift to Christian people in bringing this idea to widespread attention was of the utmost value. However, the ground from which their idea sprang was not biblical. The state was not looked upon as a God-established entity for the control and direction of certain areas of life. Instead it was thought to be an unfortunate necessity in this sinful age, here for the purpose of controlling sin but unnecessary in a truly Christian society. Thus the area of Moses’ leadership of the people of God was exscinded from their life as much as possible. The state was left to be an institution where sinners tried to control other sinners without enjoying the true favor of God.

Progress toward a more biblically balanced view of the state and its relation to the church was made in Geneva in the time of John Calvin. But as modern criticism of the actions of the Genevan state in the cases of Castellio and Servetus shows, the church was not yet properly restricting itself to permitting the state to conduct only civil functions. It was still encouraging the state to interfere in spiritual affairs. An obvious example of this was the participation of a prominent Genevan, Theodore Beza, in the Colloquy of Poissy, a conference arranged by the French state so that it might take further steps to regulate the churches of France. Instead of defending Reformed theology in a state tribunal, the Protestants should have been urging the state to leave the church to its task and to restrict itself to its own duties.

STATURES

Suppose that, gaining heaven,

We’d find ourselves as tall or small

In spirit statures, visible to all,

As we deserve.

Some bishops might be centimeters high,

Some housemaids would be giants.

You? And I?

On earth grasshopper-statured souls

May still succeed;

On streets celestial they would not

Make speed.

ELVA McALLASTER

The principles that were to lead Reformed churches in this direction did begin, however, with Calvin. He refused to accept state direction of the content of worship and pressed for greater freedom in determining its frequency. The Institutes clarify the direct responsibility of the civil magistrate to God and, in a famous passage near the close, point out that even the subordinate magistrate may have a duty to God that supersedes his responsibility to his superior civil authority. This is important. The magistrate receives his responsibilities directly from God. He does not depend on the church to tell him God’s orders; he learns them himself from the Word.

The right of the Christian citizen to be free from tyranny and to bring the state into its proper sphere was upheld increasingly by leaders of Reformed thought. The author of the Vindication Against Tyrants in France, George Buchanan with his Law of Government Among the Scots, Samuel Rutherford with Law is King—these leaders were trying to free men from oppression so that they could assume their proper responsibilities as citizens before God. They were operating on the sound and biblical principles of the church and the state as separate divine institutions, each charged with its proper task, each doing its divinely imposed duty without interfering with the other. Buchanan was trying to do away with the idea, to use his own words, that “what Christ commanded is to be valid only if the Bishop of Rome approves” (tr. Duncan H. MacNeill, p. 45). The commands of Christ come directly to the conscience of every Christian.

One of the grandest days in Scottish history came when Andrew Melville faced the young king, James VI, and said:

Sir, as I have told you before, so I must tell you again: there are two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland. There is King James, the head of the Commonwealth, and there is Christ Jesus, the head of the Church, whose subject James VI is, and in whose kingdom he is not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member.

Here speaks the true voice of the Scriptures and of their application to human history. Each kingdom is God’s kingdom, but each has its own sphere of operation. When both perform their duties faithfully, the result is thorough harmony in principle and in operation.

The Bible teaches that faith in God is the foundation for all attempts to meet human need. The Christian Church meets the spiritual needs of men. It teaches them how to face their own relation to God, and it teaches them how the grace of God operates. When that grace has worked in the heart of a man, he becomes concerned about human need. As a Christian citizen he, not the church, goes out to do battle with the social ills of men. The Christian must battle social ills. The church tells him so. They must be fought, and fought on Christian principles. But it is the citizen, not the church, who goes to the war.

The church teaches men how to find the spring of the energy for the contest against wrong. The Christian does the fighting.

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