“There is no power on earth that would compare to what [Leviathan] has become so that it would fear anyone.” (translation of Vulgate Job 41:33)
How should contemporary Christians approach church and state relations? One entry point is by considering the extent of the cultural mandate in Genesis 1:26–28 in terms of modern challenges to it. There are two linked parts contained in that short passage: the first addresses humanity made in the image of God and the second the cultural mandate. If humanity is not considered as made in the image of God, at a basic level human beings are not dignified as persons (e.g., Roe v. Wade 1973). But when human dominion and power are conceived of as absolute, the state easily functions to the detriment of the church. I focus on this latter issue in this article in relation to limited state power and the liberty of the church.
What happens when human dominion is conceptualized apart from human submission to God? In pursuit of progress toward that answer, I will compare two seventeenth-century thinkers who considered the nature of state power in terms of its limitations. One thinker articulated a theory of unlimited state power while the other a theory of limited state power. Amid these discussions of state power, a helpful point of reference when facing a pluralist society and the modern state today is the 1788 American revisions to the Westminster Confession of Faith on the civil magistrate’s role and the liberty of the church. After examining these, I will end with a reflection on governments that claim total power and demand utter subservience.
Thomas Hobbes and His Leviathan: The King above Law
The first thinker was a political philosopher and absolute monarchist, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who lived to see Britain and Ireland plunged into multiple civil wars, the English parliament execute their king, and puritans and covenanters become dissidents and outlaws upon the reestablishment of the monarchy. Hobbes’s 1651 work, Leviathan, or the matter, forme, & power of a commonwealth ecclesiastical and civill, has been studied by political philosophers and legal theorists ever since, garnering praise and engagement from Karl Marx and Jean Jacques Rousseau, among others. For Hobbes, the most important reason to argue for absolute power of the monarch and absolute relegation of right by the citizenry was for political security and civil peace.
Using the image of leviathan, an insurmountable and invincible creature intended to overawe all rivals, Hobbes unpacked a theory of sovereign power and commonwealth in terms of an authoritarian entity that he would call variously the crown, the sovereign, and the monarch. On the original cover of the 1651 Leviathan is the picture of a king bearing a crown and brandishing a sword and crozier, traditional medieval symbols of the two powers of church and state. The two powers, spiritual (church) and temporal (state), were contested in longstanding debates regarding the limits of papal and imperial power as far back as Pope Gelasius I’s letter to Emperor Anastasius Augustus (494), as well as in the debates regarding the church’s power in ordination and investiture between Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–1085) and Emperor Henry IV (r. 1086–1105). In the Renaissance, Marsilius of Padua (1270–1342) argued for a limited ecclesiastical power in order that the church could be reformed. In the fifteenth century, the debates surfaced again in the conciliarist movement on the limitation of the papacy by a church council. On the question of papal power versus imperial power in the sixteenth century, Protestants favored by their sovereign chose the state as the most competent agent to enable the reformation of the church. For Protestants persecuted by their sovereign, the church was deemed competent to reform itself apart from the magistrate and the papacy, but they often did so as
outlaws. All grappled with the question of how exactly church and state were related. Hobbes, then, joins an old conversation, arguing that the church and state are not
under the pope, but both church and state are absolutely under an unlimited sovereign power within its domain. Additionally, in this cover image, what at first appears to
be an armor of scale mail is actually comprised of people knitted together into a body corporate whose head is a king, forming a corporate commonwealth. If the commonwealth were the legal body politic in all its jurisdictional and juridical forms, the soul, intellect, will, and head of that body in Hobbes’s view is the sovereign. Just
as the soul directs the body, so the will of the sovereign directs the commonwealth.
How does Hobbes justify his view? The native condition of humanity is the genesis of Hobbes’s claims for a sovereign and a commonwealth. According to Hobbes the absolute sole sovereign is necessary as a remedy,
because the condition of Man … is a condition of War of every one against every one, in which case every one is governed by his own reason; and there is nothing he can make use of that may not be a help unto him in preserving his life against his enemies. It follows that in such a condition, every man has a right to everything, even to one another’s body. And therefore as long as this natural right of every man to everything endures, there can be no security to any man …
Note that the absolute individual exercise of natural right in Hobbes’s vision of society is an existential threat to the safety of society. In his view, what is necessary is an absolute yielding and subduing of all individual natural rights for the creation of an artificial contracted commonwealth for the common good, thereby mutually eliminating the natural right and therefore natural claim of all to all property. The elimination of such absolute claims and rights is how to eliminate the condition of war and usher in an age of security. In Christianity, building upon the creation account in Genesis 1–3, the individual, the marital union, and the family all properly and originally related to God in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, which precedes punishment. This seems like a general articulation of the duties of government. In the exercise of a sovereign’s power, however, Hobbes claimed a sovereign could intentionally execute an innocent man without committing a crime, based on his interpretation of King David’s murder of Uriah. While it was a sin against God and a crime against Uriah’s natural rights, Hobbes contends that within the domain of the state, David committed no crime or injustice against Uriah, since monarchs cannot break the law. In fact, Uriah consented to his murder in his original pledge of fealty to David.
But what of matters of faith, worship, and doctrine? Religion and the interpretation of Scripture? Even conscience itself? Consider Hobbes’s approach to the Sovereign and Scripture, when he argues that since sovereigns in their domains are the sole legislators,
… those books only are canonical, that is, Law in every nation, which are established for such by the Sovereign Authority. … and therefore when [God] speaks to any subject, he ought to be obeyed, whatsoever any earthly potentate command to the contrary. But the question is not of obedience to God, but of when and what God hath said; which to subjects that have no supernatural revelation, cannot be known, but by that natural reason which guided them, for the obtaining of peace and justice to obey the authority of their several commonwealths, that is to say, [it belongs] to their lawful sovereigns.
In this quote, Hobbes pays lip-service to the supremacy of God as the ultimate sovereign authority but contends that the canon of Scripture and its meaning are
determined by the human sovereign, as all individuals equally lack supernatural revelation because only the sovereign can make Scripture public law. In this vacuum
of authoritative interpretation, the sovereign has the right of final determination of the canon of Scripture, its content, and an individual’s conscience. Hobbes in
one stroke shrouds Scripture and its interpretation in an envelope of state control, relegating the spiritual ministry of the church as a vassal, agent, and mouthpiece of a
sovereign temporal state. That the state is the arbiter of all meaning and significance is a core aspect of totalitarianism, whether in the seventeenth century or the twentieth. Benito Mussolini’s dictum encapsulating the political philosophy of fascism—“all within the state, none outside the state, none against the state”—sounds similar to the totalitarian power of the sovereign set forth in Leviathan. Mussolini tolerated traditional Roman Catholicism only if it aligned with and served the reigning ideology. Hobbes similarly subordinated the preaching of pastors to the sovereign:
There is therefore no other government in this life, neither of State nor Religion, but temporall; nor teaching of any doctrine lawfull to any Subject,
which the Governor both of the State and of the Religion forbiddeth to be taught: and the Governor must be one … The Doctors of the Church are called
Pastors; so also are civill soveraignes: but if pastors be not subordinate one to another, so as that there may bee one chief pastor, men will be taught contrary
doctrines, whereof both may be, and one must be false. Who that one chief pastor is, according to the law of nature, hath already shewn; namely, that
it is the civil sovereign; and to whom the Scripture hath assigned that office …
Hobbes argued even more explicitly that the civil sovereign is the judge of heresy and can never be a heretic, “for haeresie is nothing else, but a private
opinion, obstinately maintained contrary to the opinion which the publique person (that is to say, the Representant of the Commonwealth) hath commanded
to be taught. By which it is manifest that an opinion publiquely appointed to bee taught, cannot be haeresie; nor the Soveraign princes that authorize
them, haeretiques.” To be clear, the state enfolding the church as Hobbes wanted results in a chained and crippled ministry. The church no longer functions prophetically to address sins and to call for repentance regardless of social or civil position. Hobbes envisions pastors as agents of political conformity and propaganda under the king as chief pastor. It does not shock us today that the Bible is outlawed under some political regimes, but it is striking when regimes edit the very text of Scripture to align with the reigning ideology. In such environments, reading, exegeting, and preaching the text of Scripture in its original language is a meaningful declaration of the liberty of the church. Leviathan in all of its reach and expanse is indeed a fitting and terrifying image of what constitutes state power over against the individual, family, and the church.
The Liberty of the Church in the 1788 WCF 23.3
Contrast Hobbes’s view with Westminster Confession of Faith 23.3 as revised and received by the Synod of New York and Philadelphia in 1788.
The revision stems from a change in perspective as well as conviction. Are Christian denominations only to be tolerated by the establishment, or do they have spiritual
liberty apart from the State? The most germane portions of WCF 23.3 are reproduced in part here:
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.
The revisions reflect significant geopolitical changes from the 1647 General Assembly of the Church of Scotland to the 1788 Synod of New York and Philadelphia.
After the National Covenant (1639) and the Solemn League and Covenant (1643), Scottish Presbyterians envisioned a unified Scottish crown and an established
Presbyterian church. However, events took a different direction. Charles I was beheaded in 1649 by the English Parliament for treason by upholding “in himself an
unlimited and tyrannical power to rule according to his will, and to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people.” This was after ten years of conflict within England,
Scotland, and Ireland, including the Bishops’ Wars, the English Civil Wars, and the Irish Confederate Wars.
The Third Civil War (1650–1652) between Scotland and England was imminent.
In 1650, at the Treaty of Breda, the exiled Charles II (1630–1685) swore to uphold the 1643 Solemn League and Covenant to gain Scotland’s military support. However, by 1660, Charles II, now king, declared his prior covenanting oath void, claiming Presbyterian principles conflicted with the crown. The Rescissory Act (1661)
voided all Scottish parliaments since 1640, ejected over four hundred Presbyterian ministers, and re-established episcopalian polity. The Abjuration Act (1662) nullified the national covenant, barring most Presbyterians from civil office. Preaching at Presbyterian conventicles was declared treason in 1685. This period, known as “The
Killing Time,” repressed Presbyterians by fines, persecution, torture, and extrajudicial executions, eliciting assassinations, risings, and rebellions in response.
Toleration movements emerged towards the end of this period. The Toleration Act of 1689 in England allowed dissenting Protestants to practice their worship
separately from the established church. A similar move occurred in Scotland. King James VII of Scotland (James II of England) allowed Roman Catholics to hold public
office in 1686 and permitted Presbyterians to worship privately in 1687. Despite this, dissenters in North America faced fines, imprisonment, or exile. It was not until the acquittal of Presbyterian minister Francis Makemie in New York in 1707 that colonials gained protection under the 1689 Toleration Act.
Religious toleration in the colonies varied. Apart from Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, toleration often stemmed from expedience. In Maryland, originally a
haven for Roman Catholics, the Protestant Revolution in 1689 led to disenfranchisement of Catholics, which persisted until Maryland’s admission to the United States. In
Virginia, the persecution of Baptists and other itinerant ministers such as Presbyterian revivalists continued throughout the mid-eighteenth century. The Toleration Act of 1689 eventually allowed unestablished congregations to build meetinghouses and form denominations. But the problem was just that, these were tolerated differences. The various denominations were not at liberty in the free and public exercise of their religion. The 1788 revision of WCF 23.3 coincided with the
presentation of the U.S. Constitution for ratification to the States. The Presbyterians did not expect religious unity in the new country nor desire state-enforced
resolution. Instead, they anticipated an environment of fervent evangelism and voluntary religious participation. Key biblical passages, John 18:36, “My kingdom is not
of this world,” and Acts 5:29, “We ought to obey God rather than men,” emphasized the liberty of the church from the state and the need for Christians to be faithful
witnesses, even if out of step with societal norms.
The church seeks liberty in the
things of God, freedom to be
the voice of godliness, grace,
and holiness to every member
of society at every level.
Most American Presbyterians, especially during the revival and missionary movements of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, held to a free church model. A. A. Hodge, in A Commentary on the Confession of Faith (1869), notes the shift from the Roman Catholic view of church supremacy over the state and the Erastian view of state supremacy over the church. Remarking on WCF 23.3, he notes, “These sections teach that the Church and the State are both divine institutions, having different objects and spheres of action, different governments and officers, and hence, while owing mutual good offices, are independent of each other.” Toleration of the church within the state is insufficient; the church seeks liberty in the things of God, freedom to be the voice of godliness, grace, and holiness to every member of society at every level.
Rutherford’s Lex Rex: The King under the Law
The second seventeenth-century figure was Samuel Rutherford (1600–1661), a Presbyterian theologian, pastor, and Scottish commissioner to the Westminster Assembly. Rutherford lived through the same turmoil as Hobbes but died one year after the restoration of the monarchy. After the Restoration in 1660, his work, Lex Rex (1644), on the subordination of the king to law, was ordered to be burned in Edinburgh and Aberdeen, and in Oxford in 1683. Why was the book treated so? Rutherford argued the power of the sovereign is limited. Rutherford was also cited by the Scottish parliament in 1661 on a charge of treason, a capital offense, but died before the process could commence. Lex Rex is a seminal piece of seventeenth-century Presbyterian political thought. One scholar labeled Rutherford’s approach to limited government one of the five points of political Calvinism. It represents a covenanter line of thought born amidst the same context in which Hobbes wrote Leviathan against Presbyterians and dissenters. Assuming the fallen nature of humanity and the need for grace, Rutherford advocated a limited, accountable, and transparent government. While Rutherford could not foresee a future with religious toleration, much less religious liberty, he argued for what moderns would call a constitutionally limited sovereign.
The biblical fulcrum against which he leveraged his view was Deuteronomy 17:18–20, And when [the king] sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law, approved by the Levitical priests. And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them, that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers, and that he may not
turn aside from the commandment, either to the right hand or to the left, so that he may continue long in his kingdom, he and his children, in Israel.
Rutherford argues that the best king knows the word of God as it applies to his realm, but especially as it applies to himself. The word of God encompasses all of life.
The king cannot compartmentalize his daily devotions, which shape his character, from the character he employs in the exercise of his office as king. Reading the word
of God is an act of submission that counters the temptation and sin to exalt oneself over others. In reading the word of God, the king is cautioned that he is only
a man serving in an office who must love the Lord God and his neighbor. A sovereign that forgets he serves the people and claims absolute power is primed for tyranny.
In Question 22, Rutherford asks whether the power of the king is absolute or limited by God’s first mold and pattern of a king.
... But that God hath given no absolute and unlimited power to a King, above the law, is evident by this: 1. He who in his first institution, is appointed
of God, by office, even when he sits on the throne to take heed to read on a written copy of God’s law, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God,
and keep all the words of this law, &c. He is not of absolute power above law, but, Deut. 17:18-19, the King, as King, while he sits on the Throne, is
to do this; Ergo, the Assumption is clear: for this is the law of the King, as King; and not of a man, as a man. But as he sits on the Throne, he is to read
on the book of the Law: and ver. 20. Because he is King, his heart is not to be lifted up above his brethren.
The principle then is a limited and accountable sovereign, balanced in his powers and fully answerable to the law. Power, dominion, and their exercise, according to Rutherford, are never absolute in the hands of human beings.
Claiming such absolute power for oneself is tantamount to claiming equality with God, says Rutherford. Against the monarchist claim of his day that asserted the
king cannot formally commit a crime even though it is a sin against God, Rutherford states:
… that absolute power to Tyrannize, is not from God. 1. Because if this Moral power to sin were from God, it being formally wickedness, [then] God must be the Author of sin. 2. Whatever Moral power is from God, the exercises of that power, and the acts thereof must be from God, and so these acts must be Morally good and just; for if the Moral power be of God, as the Author, so must the acts be. Now the acts of a Tyrannical power are acts of sinful injustice and oppression and cannot be from God.
Rutherford argues further that “[Absolute power is] a power contrary to justice, to peace and the good of the people; it looks to no law as a rule, and so is unreasonable, and forbidden by the Law of God, and the Civil Law …” Here Rutherford, contrary to the claims of monarchists and totalitarians, argues it is not simply that sovereigns are subject to the Law of God. Even staunch
royalists in Rutherford’s day would have argued that. Rather, his point is that kings as kings are subject to civil law and its consequences. Rutherford argues further that absolute power “cannot be a lawful power, and cannot constitute a lawful judge; …. How can the Judge be the Minister of God for good to the people, (Rom. 13:4) if he have such a power as a King given him of God to destroy and waste the people?”
Turning his attention away from a king and to the people, Rutherford argues for a limited government answerable to the people. He also argues that citizens, contra Hobbes, retain their natural right of defense against unjust exercise of force:
… An absolute power is contrary to nature, and so unlawful, for it makes the people give away the natural
power of defending their life against illegal and cruel violence, and makes a man who needs to be ruled and lawed by nature, above all rule and law; and one who by nature can sin against his brethren, such a one as cannot sin against any, but God only,
and makes him a Lion and an unsocial man.
And it is here that we find the crux of the argument for Christians pondering politics.
Rutherford is plain that limited, accountable government that walks in accord with the Scriptures is an incalculable blessing. He is also clear that sovereigns claiming absolute power walk contrary to the law of nature, the Law of God, and the law of man. No one in principle has the right to sin, whether citizen or sovereign. Theologically, it is unconscionable for a Christian to maintain that God gives the right to a minister of justice to act unjustly. For these and other arguments, in 1661 Rutherford was declared a traitor. Such is the consequence of speaking against a leviathan, a regime that claims absolute power.
A Reflection on the Death of a Leviathan
How should contemporary Christians consider questions of church and state relations? With care. The postures of individual nation-states towards the church, Christians, and Christianity are not equivalent. The state as servant is a minister of justice for the terror of evildoers and a protector of the good (cf. Rom. 13:1–7). But insofar as it is a question of a leviathan that does not tolerate the church’s liberty and seeks to engulf it, I would like to conclude by reflecting
for a moment on my recent visit to the Amphithéâtre des Trois-Gaules in Lyon, France, the old Roman city of
Lugdunum.
Pausing on a patch of nondescript red clay some twenty yards in diameter, just one quadrant of the original size, I watched as nonchalant stagehands set up for an outdoor summer concert and a pop-up bar for the night’s event. What drew me to this spot was not the coming entertainment. It was the entertainment that
had occurred.
A leviathan may rage for a time, but it will meet its limit at last.
I was standing amidst the ruins of an ancient amphitheater that once accommodated at least 20,000 people,
built in 19 AD to secure the loyalty of one of the most powerful Gallic tribes to oppose the Romans. After
their conquest by Julius Caesar, it became a site where representatives of the three Gallic kingdoms Aquitania,
Belgica, and Lugdunensis annually pledged perpetual and undying allegiance to the absolute rule and sovereignty
of Rome. The amphitheater was adjacent to the oldest temple outside of Rome devoted to the imperial cult, worshipping Dea Roma, the goddess Rome, and the Augusti, the emperors. This temple was also one of the largest sites for emperor worship in the western empire, with a marble courtyard fifty meters long supporting an altar nine meters tall and almost fifteen meters wide, and two columns thirteen meters high each with a statue of the goddess victory three meters tall. It was a bastion of power and grandeur. Here in stone was a leviathan’s temple to overawe all as a mortal god. And if there was any doubt, its criminals and dissidents rubricated the red clay redder still. Its state-funded priests boomed,
muttered, and silently performed their mysteries of Roman divinity daily. Christians would have been pressed to just pinch incense over fire and admit the emperor a god alongside their God. And while other deities dotted the city in homes, streets, and alcoves, this was the most prominent edifice. In view of the balconies and terraces of that complex above, overlooking the amphitheater below, here on this red clay Christians met their deaths in 177 AD at the jaws of roaring lions with the jeers of a roaring crowd. With a mortal emperor-god enshrined in stone and the crowd proclaiming loyalty, Christians pleaded their faith, bled, and died bearing witness.
The second-century church at Lyon was a mission church whose first pastors were Greek-speaking Christians from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean. And while they prayed for the peace of their city and sought its prosperity ministering in it, they were accustomed to a costly witness, to faithfulness in suffering, refusing to worship the emperor or validate the imperial cult. For there is only one God with absolute dominion, of that they were sure. While it is unknown what they prayed, said, or sang as they died, if the writings of Irenaeus of Lyon serve (d. c. 202 in a Roman massacre), they knew the words of Paul,
For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey Christ (2 Cor. 10:3–5).
The Roman empire, that ancient leviathan, sanguinary and savage in its persecution of Christianity, has passed. The trinkets of Roman rule in Lugdunum—inscriptions, stones, mosaics, baubles, pots, shards, keys, locks, and bits of glass and boats, antiquarian wonders all—are partially housed in an austere concrete museum across the two rivers, next to another two ancient amphitheaters; more a tomb than a living city. Rome’s pride and glory in Lugdunum, such as it remains, can be visited for a bargain discount at €2.50. But the other remains of its worldly splendor—its leviathan temple—have been lost to history, paved over with parking lots, high rise apartments, cafes, and shopping centers. Virgil once boasted of Rome in poetry that Jupiter had given it imperium sine fine, empire without limit. A boast now hollower than ever. A leviathan may rage for a time, but it will meet its limit at last. Standing and reflecting on the witness of the church and the preserving hand of God, I found that Isaiah 27:1 came to mind, that the Lord will defend his church.
In that day the Lord with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing
serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea.
Not too far from the ruins of that silent amphitheater and a fifth-century church, I had the privilege of worshipping in Lyon with a faithful congregation meeting in a rented theater, still preaching and praising God, finding promise, hope, and courage, with uplifted voices singing freely without fear, Tout pour la gloire de Dieu et de l’Agneau! All for the glory of God and the Lamb!
With thanks to Rev. Dr. John Anderson, the session, and congregation of Bay Presbyterian Church (PCA) Bonita Springs, FL, this article has been adapted from an address delivered on abuses of the Creation Mandate at their Expositors Conference, Feb. 22–23, 2024.