Devotional 125: The Magistrate and the Church: Civil Government Not to Interfere

The Confession Read

Civil magistrates may not assume to themselves the administration of the Word and sacraments; or the power of the keys of the kingdom of heaven; or, in the least, interfere in matters of faith. Yet, as nursing fathers, 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. And, as Jesus Christ hath appointed a regular government and discipline in his church, no law of any commonwealth should interfere with, let, or hinder, the due exercise thereof, among the voluntary members of any denomination of Christians, according to their own profession and belief. It is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the person and good name of all their people, in such an effectual manner as that no person be suffered, either upon pretense of religion or of infidelity, to offer any indignity, violence, abuse, or injury to any other person whatsoever: and to take order, that all religious and ecclesiastical assemblies be held without molestation or disturbance.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 23, Section 3

Introduction

Uzziah was sixteen years old when he began to reign in Jerusalem, and for the greater part of his long life the Scripture grants him the verdict it reserves for very few kings: he did that which was right in the sight of the LORD. He built towers in the desert, and digged many wells; he loved husbandry; his fame spread abroad even to the entering in of Egypt, for the LORD made him to prosper. And then his strength undid him. "When he was strong, his heart was lifted up to his destruction," the historian records, and the proud king, forgetting the bounds that God had drawn around his throne, crossed the threshold that no son of Judah was ever permitted to cross. He went into the temple of the LORD to burn incense upon the altar of incense, a thing appointed to the priests alone, the consecrated sons of Aaron. Fourscore valiant priests withstood him, and Azariah their chief spoke the sentence that every magistrate in every age must hear: "It appertaineth not unto thee, Uzziah, to burn incense unto the LORD." The king was wroth, the censer already in his hand — and the leprosy rose up in his forehead before them all, beside the altar of incense. They thrust him out of the house of the LORD, and he dwelt a leper to the day of his death, because he had reached for what was never his to touch (2 Chronicles 26:16–21). That story is the entire doctrine of this section compressed into a single scene, and it is the story the Westminster Divines carried in their minds when they wrote the words we are about to study. In our earlier studies of this chapter we saw the Confession declare that the magistrate is an ordinance of God, armed with the sword for the glory of God and the public good; and we saw, against the Anabaptists and the Quakers, that it is lawful for a Christian to accept and execute that office, and even to wage a just and necessary war. But now the Confession turns to the other side of the question, and it draws a line that is just as important as anything it has yet affirmed. If the magistrate may wield the sword, there is something he may not wield. If the throne is an ordinance of God, the pulpit is not its appendage. There are powers that belong to Christ alone, and to the church that he has called out of the world, and no civil ruler may stretch out his hand toward them without becoming another Uzziah before the altar. This is not a dusty question of seventeenth-century church politics. It is the question of the boundary between the two kingdoms, the two governments, the two powers that God has established in this present age. Who may preach the Word, and who may be forbidden to preach it? Who may administer the sacraments, and who may be compelled to receive them at another's hand? Who holds the keys that bind and loose in the kingdom of heaven — the magistrate with his sword, or the church with her officers? And may the state prefer one denomination of Christians above the rest, or silence the assemblies of any of them, or set itself up as a judge of what is true and false in the things of God? Every one of these questions has cost blood to answer, and every one of them is answered, with a calm and careful precision, by the section now before us. But notice before we enter it that this section moves in two directions at once, and both are essential. First it forbids: the magistrate may not assume the keys. Then it commands: as a nursing father he must protect the church, and protect her without preferring one denomination above another. The prohibition without the command would leave the church exposed to a hostile state; the command without the prohibition would deliver her into the arms of a paternal tyrant. The genius of the section, and the source of its enduring wisdom, is that it holds both together in a single breath — the sword that must not be drawn over the conscience, and the strong arm that must be extended for the conscience's defence.

Scripture Foundation

The deepest root of the section's second clause lies in a prophecy that every Puritan child knew by heart. God, addressing Zion through the prophet Isaiah, promised that the day would come when the nations would serve the church rather than persecute her: "And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers" (Isaiah 49:23). The Confession borrows the phrase directly, and the Hebrew word behind "nursing fathers" repays careful attention. The term is 'ōmēn, from a root that means to support, to nourish, to carry, to bring up — the same root from which our word amen is drawn, for it speaks of that which is firm and dependable. An 'ōmēn is a guardian, a foster-father, one who is entrusted with the care of a child who is not his own and who is charged to feed it, to shelter it, and to see it safely grown. The picture is precise, and it is not the picture of a lord. A nursing father does not beget the child, does not rule the child's soul, does not sit in the place of the child's true parent. He stands beside the child, provides for the child, and shields the child from harm. That is exactly the office the Confession assigns to the magistrate with respect to the church: he is to protect and nourish, but he is not the church's father, not her head, and not her lord. The image silently forbids as much as it commands, for the moment the nurse begins to act as though the child were his own possession, he has ceased to be a nurse and become a usurper. The first clause, the prohibition, is grounded in the teaching of our Lord himself, who is the sole possessor of the power that the magistrate is forbidden to touch. "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth," Christ declared, and then, on the strength of that authority, he issued the commission that governs the church to the end of the age: "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you" (Matthew 28:18–20). The authority to teach, to baptize, and to order the observance of Christ's commands is his, and it is his alone, and it is delegated not to the state but to the ministers and officers of the church. The same point is made even more sharply in the promise that precedes it in Matthew's Gospel, when Christ says to Peter: "I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven" (Matthew 16:19). The Greek word for "keys" is kleis, and it yields the phrase by which the church has ever after named this power — potestas clavium, the power of the keys. A key is an instrument of opening and shutting, of admission and exclusion, and the keys of the kingdom are the means by which entrance into the church of Christ is granted or withheld: the preaching of the Word, the administration of the sacraments, and the exercise of discipline. These are not powers of the sword. They are powers of the Word and the Spirit, and the Lord who alone holds them in his own hand has committed them to his church, not to Caesar. If the New Testament establishes that the keys belong to Christ and his church, the Old Testament sets a warning sign at the border that no magistrate may cross. The story of Uzziah, which opened our study, is the warning, and its lesson is as plain as the leprosy that broke out in the king's forehead. The burning of incense was a sacred act, appointed to the priests alone, and when the king presumed to perform it, he was not merely guilty of bad manners; he was guilty of trespass against the living God, and the Lord smote him for it. The king's crown did not carry within it the priest's consecration. The sword did not become a censer because a royal hand held it. The most powerful magistrate in the land, a man who had done right all his days, was cut off from the house of the LORD for a single act of intrusion into the sacred office — a sign, written in the flesh of a king, that the powers of civil rule and the powers of divine worship are not the same, and that God will not suffer them to be confused (2 Chronicles 26:16–21). But the section's teaching is not exhausted by the negative. There is a text that draws the positive boundary of the magistrate's power as precisely as any in Scripture, and it comes from the lips of the apostles when the civil authority of their own day commanded them to be silent about the very things they had been commissioned to preach. When the Sanhedrin, the ruling council of the nation, forbade Peter and the other apostles to teach in the name of Jesus, the answer was immediate and unanswerable: "We ought to obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). The Greek verb is peitharchein, to obey one who is in authority, and the apostles do not deny that the council possesses authority. What they deny is that the council's authority reaches into the matter before them. When the civil power commands what God forbids, or forbids what God commands, the believer and the church stand on this rock: we must obey God rather than men. Here, in one sentence, is the whole doctrine of the limits of the magistrate's power. The state may bind the body, and may do so lawfully; it may tax, and punish, and make war, and restrain the violent, as we have already seen. But there is a point at which its writ runs out, and that point is the conscience, the faith, the worship, and the discipline of the church of Christ. The magistrate who passes that point meets the same wall that the Sanhedrin met: a calm, unyielding, apostolic refusal, backed by the authority of heaven.

What the Divines Meant

The Divines begin with a flat prohibition, and it is worth observing how sweeping it is. The civil magistrate may not assume to himself the administration of the Word and sacraments, or the power of the keys of the kingdom of heaven, or — and here the sentence reaches its widest point — "in the least, interfere in matters of faith." The three clauses are a descending scale from the specific to the general. The Word and the sacraments are the particular instruments by which the church is gathered and fed; the keys are the whole government by which she is ordered; and "matters of faith" is the broadest possible category, sweeping up every question of what a man believes and how he worships. The phrase "in the least" is the sharpest edge of the whole sentence, for it forbids not only the open seizure of the pulpit but the subtlest encroachment upon it — the state that does not preach itself but tells the preacher what he may not say, the magistrate who does not celebrate the sacrament but compels the celebration, the ruler who does not define doctrine but decides which doctrines may be publicly professed. All of it is forbidden. The magistrate is not the judge of controversy in religion, not the source of the church's doctrine, and not the ordinary minister of her worship. These things belong to Christ, and to the church under Christ, and the sword of the magistrate, for all its lawful terror, has no authority in this realm. Behind this prohibition stands a distinction that the whole Reformed tradition laboured to make plain, and that the Divines compressed into the difference between two Latin phrases. The magistrate, the older theologians taught, has a jus circa sacra — a right about sacred things — but he has no jus in sacra, no right in the sacred things themselves. The distinction is fine but it is not subtle, for it marks the difference between protection and possession. The magistrate's right about sacred things is a real and weighty right: he is to see that the church is not molested, that her assemblies are not disturbed, that the public peace in which she worships is preserved, and that no man is molested for his faith. But his right in the sacred things themselves is nothing, for the Word and the sacraments and the keys are not his to touch. A man may guard the door of a house without owning the house, and may defend its inhabitants without sitting at their table or ruling their household; and so the magistrate guards the church without governing her, protects her without possessing her, and serves her peace without administering her worship. This is the meaning of the first clause, and it is the boundary that keeps the two kingdoms from collapsing into one. But the Divines did not leave the church without a defender, and the second movement of the section is as careful as the first. "Yet, as nursing fathers, it is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the church of our common Lord." The word "yet" is doing the work of a hinge: it concedes nothing of the prohibition, and it adds a duty that flows out of it. Because the magistrate may not rule the church, it does not follow that he may ignore her. He is bound to protect her, and the word chosen for his duty is the word of Isaiah — 'ōmēn, the nursing father — a figure of tenderness, of provision, of shelter, and of guardianship, but never of lordship. And the protection is to be extended "without giving the preference to any denomination of Christians above the rest." Here the Confession states, in language that would have astonished an earlier age, the principle that the state is no respecter of denominations. It is to protect the church of our common Lord — the whole body of professing Christians — and in that protection it is to show no favouritism, to play no favourites, to exalt no one denomination into the place of a national establishment and to depress no other into a tolerated minority. The magistrate's shield is to be held over them all alike, so 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." This last clause is worth pausing over, because it states a positive and expansive liberty rather than a bare tolerance. The magistrate is not merely to refrain from persecution; he is to secure, for every minister of every denomination, the "full, free, and unquestioned liberty" of his sacred office. Full — not partial or conditional. Free — not hedged about with licences and permissions granted at the pleasure of the state. Unquestioned — not subject to the magistrate's inquiry into whether the doctrine preached is sound or the worship offered is acceptable. The liberty belongs to the office, not to the magistrate's approval of it, and the magistrate's part is to guarantee it "without violence or danger" — to hold back the mob, to restrain the persecutor, to see that no man is beaten or burned or driven out for the exercise of his ministry. This is the Confession's doctrine of religious liberty, and it is one of the noblest things the Westminster standards ever taught. There is, finally, a third clause, and it concerns the internal government of the church. "As Jesus Christ hath appointed a regular government and discipline in his church, no law of any commonwealth should interfere with, let, or hinder, the due exercise thereof." The church, the Divines insist, is not a creature of the state, and her government is not a grant of the magistrate's favour. It is the appointment of Christ, who alone is her head, and it is to be exercised among "the voluntary members of any denomination of Christians, according to their own profession and belief." The word "voluntary" is the key to the whole clause. The church is a voluntary society: men join her by their own profession of faith, and they submit to her discipline by their own free consent, not by the compulsion of the sword. Her authority is therefore of an entirely different order from the state's. The state binds by force; the church binds by the Word and the Spirit and the consent of her members. The state punishes by the sword; the church disciplines by admonition, suspension, and, at the last, exclusion from her communion. And because the church's government is of this spiritual and voluntary kind, no law of any commonwealth may "interfere with, let, or hinder" its due exercise. The magistrate who sets himself to reform the church's worship, to appoint her officers, to dictate her discipline, or to dissolve her assemblies has overstepped his own commission and laid hands upon the appointment of Christ.

Theological Depth

Calvin, who had watched the civil power swallow the church's liberty in his own day, gave this doctrine its sharpest edge. In the Institutes he distinguishes two powers that exist side by side in the present age: the spiritual power, which the church exercises by the Word of God and by no force of arms, and the civil power, which the magistrate exercises by the sword. The two are not enemies, for both are ordained by God and both serve his glory; but they are not the same, and the confusion of them is the ruin of both. The spiritual power, Calvin insists, is not a dominion but a ministry. The church's officers do not bear rule after the manner of princes; they preach, they admonish, they bind and loose by the Word, and their whole authority is the authority of the message they carry, not of the force they command. The magistrate, by contrast, rules by coercion, and his power is exactly that which the church does not possess. From this Calvin draws the consequence that the Confession states: the magistrate may protect the church and even foster the true religion — he is, in the older phrase, the guardian of both tables of the law — but he may not preach, may not administer the sacraments, and may not wield the keys. To give him the keys would be to arm the gospel with the sword, and to give the church the sword would be to corrupt the gospel with coercion. Each power, kept in its own sphere, is a blessing; either, straying into the other's, becomes a curse. Watson carries the same truth into the very heart of the church's worship. The keys of the kingdom, he teaches in his Body of Divinity, are not made of iron but of doctrine and discipline. They are the Word preached, by which the door of the kingdom is opened to the penitent, and the discipline administered, by which the obstinate are shut out; and both alike are spiritual, wielded not by the magistrate's arm but by the church's ministers in the name of Christ. This is why the power of the keys can never rest in the state. A magistrate may punish the body, but he cannot reach the conscience; he may bind the limbs, but he cannot bind or loose a soul. Only the Word, applied by the Spirit, can open a heart to the kingdom or close the kingdom against a hardened heart. Watson's point is that the distinction is not a matter of church politics but of the nature of the thing: the keys are spiritual because the kingdom is spiritual, and a power that is spiritual by nature cannot be exercised by a power that is earthly by nature. The state that seizes the keys seizes an instrument it cannot even hold. A. A. Hodge, in his commentary on the Confession, gathers the whole argument into the contrast between the sword and the keys. The state's power, he observes, is physical and coercive: it acts upon the body and the property, and its sanctions are the pain and the loss that it can inflict. The church's power is moral and spiritual: it acts upon the conscience and the will, and its only sanctions are the truth it preaches and the discipline it administers. These two powers are not different in degree but in kind, and they can no more be exchanged than a sword can be used as a key or a key as a sword. From this follows everything else in the section. Because the church is a voluntary society of those who have professed faith in Christ, her membership is a matter of free consent, and her discipline binds only those who have freely submitted to it; the state, by contrast, is a society of all men within its borders, bound by the necessity of their birth or residence. And because the church is Christ's own appointment, the magistrate who would govern her as he governs the state has forgotten who her head is. Hodge's conclusion is the Confession's: the magistrate is a nursing father — a protector, not a proprietor — and his protection is to be held out to every denomination without partiality. Robert Shaw, in his Exposition of the Confession, presses the point that lies just beneath the section's surface: Christ alone is the head of the church, and therefore no magistrate can be. The church has one Lord, one lawgiver, one king, and his rule over her is immediate and exclusive; to set the magistrate in his place is not to assist Christ but to displace him. Shaw is careful, however, not to deny the magistrate his true honour. The magistrate is, in the phrase the section borrows from Isaiah, a nursing father, and Shaw insists that this is a high and holy office — to protect the church, to secure her liberty, to hold the peace in which the gospel may run and be glorified. But it is an office of service, not of sovereignty, and the moment the nursing father presumes to stand in the place of the father himself, he has become what Uzziah became — a leper at the altar, smitten for reaching toward what God had not given him. Shaw's exposition, like the section itself, holds the two truths together: the magistrate is to be honoured as a protector, and he is to be resisted the instant he ceases to be one. Turretin supplies the finest instrument of all, and it is the distinction we have already met in its Latin dress. In his Institutes of Elenctic Theology he distinguishes with characteristic precision between the magistrate's jus circa sacra, his right about sacred things, and any jus in sacra, a right in the sacred things themselves. The jus circa sacra is genuine and important: the magistrate may summon synods, may be present at them, may preserve the outward order and peace in which the church worships, and may remove the obstacles that hinder the free course of the gospel. But the jus in sacra — the right to preach, to administer the sacraments, to frame doctrine, to exercise discipline — belongs to the church alone, because it was committed by Christ to her officers and to no one else. Turretin's distinction does more than settle the question; it reveals its structure. The magistrate stands around the church, guarding her, serving her, providing for her peace; he does not stand in her, preaching from her pulpit or sitting at her font or laying hold of her keys. And the two positions — around, not in — are the exact shape of the boundary that this section is written to draw.

Puritan Application

First, keep the two powers distinct, and teach your children to do the same. The confusion of the pulpit and the throne is not an error that belongs only to kings; it creeps into the heart of every believer who would rather compel a man than persuade him. In the church we have no sword: we have the Word, the sacraments, and the keys of discipline, and these are enough, for they are the instruments Christ has appointed. In the state there is a sword, and it is God's, and it is to be used for the punishment of evildoers and the defence of the innocent — but never to settle a question of doctrine or to force a conscience. Guard this boundary in your own thinking. Do not ask the magistrate to do the church's work of binding the conscience, and do not ask the church to do the magistrate's work of bearing the sword. The two kingdoms will each be healthier, and the gospel more credible, the more faithfully the one refuses to be the other. Second, rejoice in the liberty of the conscience, and do not surrender it. The same Lord who has given the keys to the church has left the conscience free before him alone, and no magistrate, however kind, may sit in the seat of Christ over a single soul. This cuts two ways, and both must be held. It means that you may not, under cover of religion, despise or injure a neighbour of another persuasion; the section forbids the magistrate to prefer one denomination, and it forbids you, no less, to offer "any indignity, violence, abuse, or injury" to any man, whether under a pretense of religion or of unbelief. And it means, on the other side, that you must not surrender your own conscience to any human power. When the state commands what God forbids, or forbids what God commands, the apostolic answer is yours to give: "We ought to obey God rather than men." Hold that liberty as an inheritance bought with blood, and neither trample it in another nor barter it away in yourself. Third, imitate the nursing father in your own sphere of influence. The office of the 'ōmēn is not confined to kings. Every father of a household, every employer, every man who holds any authority over another is charged to be a protector and not a tyrant — to provide, to shelter, to defend the weak who are committed to his care, and to refuse the temptation to rule their souls. Think especially of the "good name" that this section commands the magistrate to protect. You cannot protect every reputation in the commonwealth, but you can refuse to wound the one within your reach; you can decline the slander, the sneer, the careless word that tears down what God has not given you leave to touch. The nursing father feeds and shields; the usurper devours and shames. Ask yourself which of the two your own authority has made you. Fourth, pray for your magistrates as nursing fathers, and pray against their becoming anything else. The duty the Confession lays upon the magistrate is high and hard, and he will not discharge it without grace. Pray that the rulers of your land would protect the church without preferring one denomination above another; that they would secure for every minister and every assembly the full, free, and unquestioned liberty of their sacred functions; that they would hold back the mob and the persecutor; and that they would never lay a hand upon the keys that belong to Christ alone. Pray too for ministers, that they would not covet the sword; and for yourselves, that you would not be among those who, in the name of a holy cause, offer violence to any man. The boundary between the kingdoms is kept not by law alone but by prayer, and by the God who answers it. Fifth, let Uzziah be a standing warning against the presumption of reaching for what is not given. His sin was not gross wickedness but presumption — the reaching of a strong man toward a holy thing that was not his. And it is a sin that lies close to every one of us, for we are all prone to covet powers we were never meant to hold. The minister is tempted to wield the sword of the world; the magistrate is tempted to seize the censer of the church; the private believer is tempted to set himself up as judge of his brother's conscience. Against them all stands the leper king, thrust from the house of the LORD, a monument for every age to the truth this section teaches: that God has appointed his powers with bounds, and that he will not be mocked by those who overstep them. Blessed is the man who knows his own place, and keeps it, and serves the Lord there with a quiet and thankful heart.

Prayer

O Lord Jesus Christ, who alone art the Head of thy church, and to whom alone is given all power in heaven and in earth, we bless thee that thou hast appointed a government and discipline for thy people, and that thou hast committed the keys of thy kingdom not to the sword of any prince but to the ministers of thy Word. We thank thee for every ruler whom thou hast raised up to be a nursing father to thy church — to protect her from violence, to guard her good name, and to hold the peace in which the gospel may be preached. Grant to all who bear authority in this world the grace to know the bounds thou hast set for them: that they may protect thy church without preferring one denomination above another, that they may secure to every minister and every assembly the full, free, and unquestioned liberty of their sacred office, and that they may never lay a hand upon thy Word, thy sacraments, or the keys of thy kingdom. And teach us, we beseech thee, to keep the boundaries thou hast drawn. Keep thy ministers from coveting the sword, and the magistrate from seizing the censer, and every one of us from judging the conscience of a brother. Grant us the humility of those who know their place, the courage of those who obey God rather than men, and the charity that refuses to injure any man, whether under a pretense of religion or of unbelief. Guard us, O Lord, from the presumption of Uzziah, and write upon our hearts the lesson of the leper at the altar, that we may reach for nothing that thou hast not given us. And bring us at last into that kingdom where thou alone art King, and where the nursing fathers and the nursed, the rulers and the ruled, shall together worship thee in spirit and in truth, world without end. Amen.