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is whether we will walk righteously after God’s own pattern for each sphere, or whether we will participate in their degradation and corruption through sin. In such an atmosphere, the rationalist attempt to fragment life into separate, walled-off chambers for “Sacred” and “Secular” withers on the vine. Upon touching the ark of God — which is His sovereignty — the attempt explodes altogether. To the Christian, there can be no meaningful distinction between these two words. All of life is sacred to God, Who has set the world upon the pillars of the earth. There is, therefore, only righteousness and unrighteousness, truth and falsehood, submission and rebellion to God in the whole of life. It is in this sense that Christians speak of selfgovernment; that we are to “walk in the light, as He is in the light.” And it was to preserve the self-governing integrity of man within these relational spheres from the more ravaging effects of sin that God first created civil government. Its purpose was to restrain lawlessness with force so an environment of ordered liberty — necessary to the practice of virtue — could be maintained, even in a fallen world. Through it, God prevented the total dissipation of humanity into chaos by forcibly and mechanically holding together the pieces of society, which had lost the ability to cohere naturally and organically among themselves. Yet as an organ of immense power, care must be taken to ensure governments do not degenerate, becoming themselves the lawlessness and destruction they were designed to prevent. Limitation is thus a necessary ingredient for any Christian view of the state. Government, which owes its existence exclusively to God and is dependent on Him for its authority, cannot transgress His patterns for its existence.3 Man must abide in an environment of ordered liberty — not lawlessness — to walk in obedience and blessed fellowship with God, and each other, and to fulfill his moral obligations and duties. Such relational priorities and obligations are impossible under centralized, totalitarian systems which demand total obeisance and devotion to the state. Gene Edward Veith warns what happens when governments consider themselves unbound by God’s moral law: “Excluding transcendent values places societies beyond the constraint of moral limits. Society is not subject to the moral law; it makes the moral law … All such issues are only matters of power. Without moral absolutes, power becomes arbitrary … Government becomes nothing more than the sheer exercise of unlimited power, restrained neither by law nor by reason.” To comprehend all of life under the
authority of the state serves practically to stifle man in his desire to obey God supremely and to walk rightly in all of his necessary spheres of relationship. While the precise limiting mechanisms may differ, no government may claim to be Christian which is not wholly consonant with this principle of constraint. A division of authority in some balanced form must necessarily result from this approach, as well as unambiguous opposition to any attempt by the state to collapse the various other spheres into itself, rendering them dependent on its power alone and destroying their natural ability to govern themselves in liberty and righteousness. Unlawful coercion will destroy the nature of a duty. For Christians, tyranny is chiefly problematic not because it tends to produce violence and poverty but because it dams up the relational channels that God Himself has dug in the human heart, through which the love and the service of His people were to flow freely. “God,” writes Herbert Titus, “has created man to be selfgoverning, that is, to diffuse authority among men, to maximize the extent of man’s volitional allegiance to Him in the performance of his duties.” A separation of power “preserves the national identity of a people in harmony with the institutions of family, ecclesiastical, and selfgovernment.”4 When this fails, tyranny and persecution are the natural consequence. And despite recent romanticizing on the subject, we were most certainly not made to be persecuted, and we should not desire it — or should we hope for sin that grace may abound? God can use persecution. But it is a terrible suppression of His creational design and a horrific affront to His glory. Much more could be said. Our idea was that a uniquely Christian view of government emerges not in the organizational forms of one historical empire or another but from the basic relational principles of man and life which God Himself has planted in this world and revealed in Scripture. He is the great End of all Being, and it is to His glory, and the good and present use of His Church, that we offer our observations here.
1 This opening is intended as a respectful homage to the opening of Fulton Sheen’s work Communism and the Conscience of the West. 2 See the works of Donald S. Lutz and John Witte Jr. 3 See William Blackstone’s second chapter, Of the Nature of Laws in General in his Commentaries on the Laws of England for discussion on existential dependency and obedience. 4 Herbert Titus, “America's Heritage: Constitutional Liberty,” A Federal Republic (Lonang Institute, n.d.).
