Sufficient and Profitable (42)
Speaking of the government, there is much discussion and debate about the separation of church and state. The controversy in this country has much to do with the meaning and interpretation of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. On this point, I agree that the First Amendment is meant to protect the church from the state, or at best from each other, but not to eliminate religion from all government sponsored programs and activities, such as the public school system.
However, the First Amendment has only a local, legal, and practical relevance. It has no direct relationship with whether something is right or wrong from the perspective of God's absolute revealed standard. The prior question is whether the First Amendment is biblical in the first place. If it is unbiblical, then it is wrong, and believers must oppose it. But if it is biblical, then it is right, and believers should advocate what it says even if there is no such amendment in the Constitution. Regardless of what human law actually says and means, the more important, universal, and spiritually relevant issue is what the Bible teaches about the proper relationship between the church and the state.
Now, suppose we agree that the church and the state are two different institutions with different functions, and that one should not usurp the other's authority. For example, the church has the power to excommunicate a murderer, but it has no right to execute him. This indeed answers some questions, but sometimes people miss the larger point, and therefore arrive at erroneous conclusions about how the government should operate. They tend to forget that just because the church cannot control or replace the government does not mean that the government is free from God's authority, or what is the equivalent in this context, the Bible's authority.
Lawmakers, politicians, judges, police officers, and so on, are all human individuals, and as such, they are never exempt from believing the gospel and behaving as Christians. They are not morally free to be atheists, to ignore biblical precepts, or to follow non-Christian religions and philosophies just because they work for the state. Every unbiblical law and every unbiblical opinion is sinful when found in any context and in any person, and will be judged by God according to the standard that he has revealed in Scripture.
Thus a government is either for Christ or against him. Just as no human individual can be neutral toward Christ, neither can a government, which consists of human individuals, be neutral. Any government that claims to be religiously neutral has already set itself against Christ. In fact, as is true with human individuals, any government that fails to explicitly pledge allegiance to Christ is an enemy of Christ.
Therefore, at least from this perspective it is irrelevant that the state is a separate institution from the church, and that the church has no legislative authority over it – the government is directly under the threat of divine curse to follow all that the Bible commands in all that it does. The fact that it is not accountable to the church makes no difference, since it is still directly accountable to God, and God condemns all laws, all opinions, and all actions other than those that he approves and permits through Scripture. Thus if the government does not learn its obligations to God from the church, it must still learn it directly from the Bible.
Many Christians are wary of theonomy, but how can the state rationally justify laws against murder, theft, rape, perjury, or any such thing without appealing to Scripture? In fact, how can the government justify its very existence apart from the Bible? Here we do not have to discuss the rights and wrongs of Reformed Theonomy, but there is no denying the fact that the government cannot justify its own existence, understand its own purpose and mandate, or define the various crimes and the severity of each crime without the Bible.42 If we must call this a form of theonomy, then so be it.
Notes
42 To defend this statement, we only need to apply our usual approach of biblical-presuppositional apologetics to the area of politics. If all non-Christian worldviews fail at the start, then there can be no rational justification for any non-Christian theory about anything, and this includes politics. See Vincent Cheung, Ultimate Questions, Presuppositional Confrontations, and On Good and Evil.
(to be continued)