Topic : Church, relation to state
Obligations to the State
The church’s task with regard to the state which is posed for all time is thus clear. First, it must loyally give the state everything necessary to its existence. It has to oppose anarchy and all zealotism within its own ranks. Second, it has to fulfill the office of watchmen over the state. That means it must remain in principle critical towards every state and be ready to warn it against transgression of its legitimate limits. Third, it must deny to the state which exceeds it limits, whatever such a state demands that lies within the province of religio-ideological excess; and in its preaching, the church must courageously describe this excess as opposition to God.
Two Sides of the Coin
One of the changes that came with the rise to power of Oliver Cromwell in 17th-century England was the nation’s coinage. New coins were struck with the engraving “God with Us” on one side, and on the reverse “The Republic of England.”
One old nobleman, a royalist and anti-Puritan to the core, saw the coins and commented: “Quite proper that God and the republic should be on different sides.”
Animosity
The church cannot share the temporal power of the state without being the object of a portion of that animosity which the latter excites. - Alexis de Tocqueville
Resource
- The Moral Catastrophe, David Hocking, Harvest House, 1990, p. 259ff.
