In principle

I’m reading Stephen Wolfe’s recent book, and I have disagreements. Today, I’d like to point out how Wolfe’s position on church-state relations fails to meaningfully separate church from state and relies on a faulty understanding of the state’s nature.

Wolfe asserts, in pages 32-37 of his Report on Christian Politics, that the magistrate has no right to interfere with the church’s exercise of spiritual (Gospel-based) powers: excommunication, preaching, etc. He says, however, that when the church uses these powers wrongly, it no longer acts as the church. “The minister as minister is unerring” (36), and so when the minister acts wrongly, he’s a mere man. In such cases, Wolfe says, the civil government can coerce the church to return to being the church.

First, my agreement: when an authority, any authority, asks outside its God-delegated authority (Rom. 13:1), it acts without authority and merely as power. An unrighteous excommunication has no authority and ought not to be respected by the church, and an unqualified elder ought not to be regarded as an elder (except in the institutional sense, where it is proper to treat him as an elder so far as is needed to expel him, or in a practical sense, as one contends with the reality of illegitimate power (Luke 18:1-8)). But….

Wolfe grants to the state the power to coerce the church whenever it does wrong. On a practical level, this amounts to removing the church’s independence completely; it would have only the independence of practical concerns, of the state not wanting to overplay its hand. Historically, such concerns are as effective as snorkelling gear at the bottom of the Mariana’s Trench (but, well, Wolfe also thinks the state is slower to go liberal than the church, so….). On a level of principle, this completely subsumes the decisionmaking in the church to the state. If the magistrate disagrees with the church, he has the right to decide what the church will do regardless; the principle extends both to omission and commission, after all (as per the Westminster Confession understanding of sin), and so the magistrate has as much right to force an excommunication as to refuse one. The church is merely an arm, in Wolfe’s structure, of the state, and it better preach what the state thinks is right- that is, whatever Wolfe says to the contrary, what his argument requires.

(Nor can he limit the state from deciding ordination, defrocking, and the like. It does not matter that these are internal to the institution; if they have any moral weight, as they must in order to be licit or illicit (a quality he attributes to them), then they are as much ‘not church’ when done illicitly as excommunication or preaching, and therefore as susceptible to the civil magistracy. So the state would have the right and duty to decide who staffed the church institution.)

Where I diverge from Wolfe, in order to avoid this grim end (and its contradiction of the Biblical view, wherein the state is never given the right to interfere in excommunication or preaching), is in conceiving of the civil government not as aimed towards establishing total public virtue but as aimed towards punishing certain categories of sin, as prescribed in Scripture, in sum in Genesis 9:5-6 (which creates the state) and more expansively across the rest of Scripture (2 Tim. 3:16-17). Under this Biblical understanding of the state, it has no right to coerce even an erring church in ecclesiastical matters (or an erring family in familial matters, such as education) unless those matters cross over into its civil sphere (i.e. if the family matter includes violent abuse or the church is sheltering a criminal from justice).

I see a state with granted authority, specific delegated rights to act, and an end of exercising that authority but no more; Wolfe sees a state with the authority to do whatever is necessary to reach public virtue, an end encompassing all personal morals (explicitly) and even religiosity. I found my argument in God’s word; he appeals to ‘natural reason,’ to premises founded only on assertion, to premises which have no authority both because their source is proscribed from Christian use (Prov. 3:5; 2 Tim. 3:16-17) and because, too often, they are in contradiction of God’s law.

Please, read his arguments, compare them to Scripture, found what is correct in its conclusions (a fair amount) on Scripture, and condemn the rest.

God bless.