Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom

by T. W. Allies

Thus it is a great and striking harmony with the witness of the Gospels and of the Acts to the transmission of Spiritual Power in the Church which the vessel of election, the Preacher of the Gentiles, contributes. Thus the figure of St. Peter stands in the New Testament between St. Matthew and St. John, supporting him on one side, and St. Paul and St. Luke on the other.

Nothing can be clearer than the mind of St. Paul in these passages. To him the fabric of government is inseparably united with the fabric of doctrine. It is one and the same institution which is indivisible in its organic structure and infallible in the truth which it upbears and expounds. He sets forth a Creed at the same moment that he describes a Body. The Creed and the Body make one thing. St. Paul’s doctrine of unity is part of his conception of truth. The Church, the Body of Christ, is as completely possessed by all the truth which came by Jesus Christ as it is dowered with the grace which also came by Him. And the Christian ministry, viewed as a whole, as the mantle dropped by Him who, ascending up on high, led captivity captive, and gave gifts to men, is that wherein the double gift of truth and grace resides indefeasibly.

I pass to another point in St. Paul’s teaching. Do the recipients of the government which in general and in particular he thus describes receive it from above or below? Does the magistracy draw its authority from a charge which the community bestows, or from a power which creates the community itself? Which is first both in principle and in time, the magistracy or the community?

There are six names by which, in various parts of his epistles, St. Paul describes the commission in virtue of which he spent his life and finally poured forth his blood in preaching the Gospel. These six names are apostle, minister, doctor, steward, ambassador, and herald. Sometimes they are mentioned singly, sometimes they are blended with each other in a way which sheds light upon them reciprocally. He terms himself an ambassador, when he says, “for Christ, therefore, we are ambassadors, God as it were exhorting by us.” And he beseeches his converts to pray for him “that speech may be given me that I may open my mouth with confidence, to make known the mystery of the Gospel, for which I am an ambassador in a chain.”[31] He refers all his power back to God when he says, “Our sufficiency is from God, who also has made us fit ministers of the New Testament,” for this word, the original of deacons, signifies here a ministry to God, not a service of men. The sufficiency was that God had accredited certain men to bear to their fellow-men a certain document, a new covenant. They stood in the relation of ministers to Him who appointed them; to those to whom they came they were the commissioned agents of a sovereign. He calls himself also a steward,[32] where he says, “Let a man so account of us as the servants of Christ, and the dispensers of the mysteries of God. Here now it is required in dispensers that a man be found faithful; but to me it is a very small thing to be judged by you, or by man’s day,—but He that judgeth me is the Lord.” And in another place he very remarkably joins together three terms which he applies to himself, while he specially connects them with the source and head of all power in that work of the dispensation which He became man to accomplish. St. Paul breaks into a sort of creed, which is like a summary of his whole message, in these most solemn words which he addresses to the archbishop whom he had himself set in the great see of Ephesus: “There is one God and one Mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself a redemption for all, a testimony in due times. Whereunto I am appointed a herald and an apostle (I say the truth, I lie not), a doctor of the Gentiles, in faith and truth.” And he joins the same three names together in another letter to the same Bishop, “The Gospel whereunto I am appointed a herald and an apostle and a doctor of the Gentiles.”[33] The original word herald was rendered by preacher; and the term Apostle has become so fixed as the name of those to whom our Lord committed His Church in chief, that the lesson as to the source of the authority which it bears in its meaning of “the sent,” has been impaired to many minds. A multitude of men preach in these days without any notion that a preacher is a man who bears a divine commission from a Sovereign to announce pardon to His people, and that a man who chooses himself for such a function is an impostor. Now what I wish to remark of these six terms, by which St. Paul expresses his own authority and that of the brethren who held the like rank with himself, is that they all concur in deriving the power and the commission which they represent from the person giving it, that is Jesus Christ, in the name of His Father, and not from the people for whose good it is bestowed. The whole publication of the Gospel is, in fact, called “The Proclamation,” which the word preacher and preaching no longer conveys. It is the message of a King to His subjects declared by His heralds. They convey it to those who hear it by a commission from above. Their whole authority comes from above, not from below. It is not the election of brethren which is the principle of their mission, but the charge of the Sender, Christ. And as the Apostles were sent, they sent their successors. Election, in subsequent times, however conducted, indicated the person upon whom power fell; but the power was from God.

A further light is thrown upon this most grand and beautiful doctrine of St. Paul as to the Church being the Body of Christ, and her ministry the appointed organ for maintaining divine truth through the whole course of time upon earth, by the magnificent vision bestowed upon the beloved Apostle when he was by command of Domitian a prisoner in the island of Patmos, “for the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus.” As he “was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, he heard behind him a great voice as of a trumpet, saying: What thou seest write in a book, and send to the seven Churches which are in Asia, to Ephesus, and to Smyrna, and to Pergamus, and to Thyatira, and to Sardis, and to Philadelphia, and to Laodicia. And I turned to see the voice that spoke with me. And being turned, I saw seven golden candlesticks; and in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks one like to the Son of Man, clothed with a garment down to the feet, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle. And His head and His hairs were white, as white wool and as snow, and His eyes were as a flame of fire, and His feet like unto fine brass, as in a burning furnace. And His voice as the sound of many waters. And He had in His right hand seven stars. And from His mouth came out a sharp two-edged sword: and His face was as the sun shineth in His power. And when I had seen Him, I fell at His feet as dead. And He laid His right hand upon me, saying, Fear not, I am the First and the Last, and He that liveth, and I became dead, and behold I am living for ever and ever, and have the keys of death and of hell. Write, therefore, the things which thou hast seen, and which are, and which must be done hereafter: the mystery of the seven stars which thou sawest in My right hand, and the seven golden candlesticks. The seven stars are the angels of the seven Churches: and the seven candlesticks are seven Churches.”

This vision occupies a quite singular position. It is, as it were, the opening scene of that revelation which was made by our Lord to the Apostle of the things that should happen in His Church from His first to His second coming; and which terminates only in the conclusion of the great conflict between the city of God and the city of the devil, when the seer beholds the Holy City “coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” It took place rather more than sixty years after the day of Pentecost, when two persecutions of the Church, the first under Nero, and the second under Domitian, had already tried the patience of the saints. Thus it dates a full generation after the time of St. Paul. In accordance with the position which it occupies at the head of a revelation given by the Lord Himself to him,

“Che vide tutti i tempi gravi,
Pria che morisse, della bella sposa,
Che s’acquistò con la lancia e co’ chiavi,”

it is a vision of extraordinary power and majesty, repeating, and if possible excelling, the grandeur of similar visions in the old prophets, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel.[34] Our Lord appears with the incommunicable name of God, as the First and the Last: as the Redeemer, that Living One who became dead and is alive for ever and ever; as the Ruler who orders all things as to the race of man, having the keys of death and of hell; as the world’s Teacher, with the sharp sword of the Word, the instrument of His dominion, proceeding out of His mouth; in the glory of the Resurrection, for His face is as the sun shining in his strength. The disciple who lay upon His breast at the Supper, now, when he saw Him, fell as one dead at His feet; but He, deigning to lay His right hand on him, raised him up, and communicated the meaning of the vision: and we learn from our Lord’s own words that it showed Him present in the government of His Church. Write, He commanded the seer, the mystery of the seven stars which thou sawest in My right hand, and the seven golden candlesticks. The seven stars are the angels of the seven Churches, and the seven candlesticks which thou sawest are seven Churches. The mystery, He said—and the number seven is mystical. The seven stars represent the whole Episcopate held in the right hand of the Lord:[35] the seven candlesticks the whole number of Churches throughout the world: and that He, the Son of Man, is in the midst of them, His perpetual government in and through those whom He has appointed:[36] and the seven letters directed to the seven Churches, may by parity betoken seven ages or conditions of the one Church.[37] For the vision, taken as a whole, exhibits the perpetual action of Christ, not in one place, but in the midst of His people from the beginning to the end. It is thus equivalent to the scope of the entire Apocalypse, at the head of which it stands. It also conveys to us, with the witness of St. John, a complete agreement with the conception of St. Paul as to the unity of the divine mission centred in the Church, and exerted by her Episcopate; as to the relation of that Episcopate to Christ, which in every age is held in His right hand, as in every age He is in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks; as to the relation also of that Episcopate to the people over which it is set: for our Lord commands what He would say to the Churches to be written to their several angels, to express the truth that they summed up in their person the flock committed to them. The stars are in His hand, while He is in the midst of the candlesticks. They are His angels, and their authority lies in the message which they bear from Him, not in any charge deputed to them by those whom they govern. Each letter gathers up the character of the people, in the single person of the angel: “I know thy works, thy labour, and thy patience:” thus expressing the doctrine of St. Cyprian, “the Church is in the Bishop.”

Thus St. Paul’s truth of the Body of Christ is delineated in the vision of Him who is the First and the Last, who became dead, and who lives for ever and ever, and from whom not only does all spiritual power originally descend, but is perpetually carried in His right hand; which does not leave Him because it is used by human instruments under Him. And if the vision seen by St. John is in perfect agreement with the conception of St. Paul, no less does it agree with, and convey in visible action, that whole account of the origin and transmission of spiritual power which we have been contemplating in the harmony of the Gospels and the Acts. Only it is to be noted that what the Gospels declare is to be, the vision exhibits as being.

If we take the whole mass of the Scripture testimony respecting the transmission of spiritual power for the government of the Church and the constitution of her polity, four qualities will appear salient: its coming from above; its completeness; its unity; its independence of civil authority.