In this part of the series, we are considering the art of persuasion—that is, convincing our neighbors of views and policies that are for the improvement of the body politic. In order to persuade our neighbors, Christians need to make three distinctions: (1) between nature and grace; (2) between the temporal and the eternal; (3) between law and gospel. In this installment we are thinking then about the distinction between the temporal and the eternal.

One of the things our non-Christian neighbors worry about when Christians become involved in secular, civil affairs is that we might confuse the eternal and the temporal. They have some basis for that concern. Christians have frequently done just that. One obvious example is the use of temporal, secular, civil power to enforce eternal ecclesiastical judgments. The early church fathers, before Christianity was legalized by the Emperor Constantine (AD 313), did not ask the state to enforce the judgments of the church. Indeed, Justin Martyr (c. AD 150) wrote to the emperor, “We ask that the charges against us be investigated, and that, if they are substantiated let us be punished as is fitting.”¹ He did not ask the civil authorities to punish Christians for theological errors. Indeed, he challenged the pagans to investigate the Christians because he was confident that the pagans would not find any transgressions of Roman law (apart from their refusal to worship the Greco-Roman gods or to honor Caesar as a deity).

Once Christianity became the established state-religion of the empire, however, things changed, and the coercive power of the state was used to enforce religious orthodoxy. The Donatists foolishly appealed to the emperor in AD 316 after their appeal to the Synod of Arles was rejected in AD 314.² Now involved directly in ecclesiastical affairs, Constantine took the opportunity to suppress the Donatists by force.³ From the eleventh century on, the church would use the power of the sword to attempt to recover “the Holy Lands” from the Islamist infidels (and to protect Christian pilgrims from terrorism and extortion), even as Bernard of Clairvaux (who himself preached the second crusade) taught that the “faith is for persuading, not for imposing.”

The establishment of the inquisition by the papal bull (a sealed document), Ad Abolendam (For the Abolition) in 1184, called for bishops to investigate and root out the Catharist heresy in their dioceses and to hand over the heretics to the civil magistrate for punishment. The practical results led to a few executions annually. Pope Innocent IV, in Ad Extirpanda (“For the Destruction Of,” 1252), authorized the use of torture. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Spanish Inquisition became an especially cruel tool in the hands of the civil magistrates. The chief reason there is relatively little to say about the Spanish Reformation is because the Spanish Protestants were either exiled or arrested and martyred for the gospel.

From the early fourth century until the eighteenth century, the coercive power of the state was frequently used to enforce religious orthodoxy and religious wars marked European life for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the Roman emperor sought to eradicate Protestantism in the Netherlands for eighty years, thirty years of which involved most of Europe (in the Thirty Years War). There were other religiously influenced wars after 1648, and that does not include the English Civil War, in which Royalists (Episcopalians and some Presbyterians) and Parliamentarians (mostly Independents and some Presbyterians) contested for control of the State and the established church. Nor does it account for the French Wars of Religion. When the American founders began by disestablishing the church at the federal level, followed by the disestablishment of the state churches over the next fifty years, they did so with good reason and to good effect. At the same time, the European and British state churches have been decimated by liberalism and latitudinarianism; the free churches in the New World, for all their sins and faults, are relatively healthier. In principle, the Americans stopped using the coercive power of the state to enforce religious dogma.

As a matter of principle and practice, therefore, to be persuasive, Christians ought to make clear to their neighbors that what we seek through the state is not to re-establish the church. We need to make clear that we understand there is a clear difference between, to use Paul’s language, “this age” (1 Cor 1:20; 2:8; 3:18) and “the age to come” (Eph 1:21). We need to make clear, as the writer to Diognetus (Diognetus 5:4–5) did c. AD 150, that we know that we Christians

live in both Greek and barbarian cities, as each one’s lot was cast, and follow the local customs in dress and food and other aspects of life, at the same time they demonstrate the remarkable and admittedly unusual character of their own citizenship. They live in their own countries, but only as aliens; they participate in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign country is their fatherland, and every fatherland is foreign.⁴

Our most fundamental citizenship is, as Paul wrote, “in heaven” (Phil 3:20), and we are seeking the city, as the writer to the Hebrews puts it, “whose builder and maker is God” (Heb 11:10). We have what John Calvin called a “twofold” (duplex) citizenship.⁵ As Justin explained, we seek to be exemplary citizens and neighbors in this life. We are “just passing through,” as the old spiritual has it. We have genuine obligations to our neighbors in this life, but we recognize the difference between the temporal (as Calvin has it) or the secular, and the eternal. They need to know that we are not trying to leverage the secular and temporal to achieve eternal ends.

Why is this important? First, because it is not in the nature of temporal, secular, civil life, as important as it is, to achieve eternal ends. Christ has established a sacred institution to achieve eternal ends. It is the embassy of the Kingdom of God, and her ministry is spiritual, not secular or political.⁶ I am speaking, of course, about the visible, institutional church. It is through the preaching of the holy gospel through which God the Spirit brings his elect to new life and true faith, thereby making them citizens of the Kingdom of God. No magistrate has any role in that wonderful grant. It is the sovereign and exclusive work of God the Spirit working through the Word preached. Christ the Lord has instituted other keys of his kingdom (Matt 16:19) as well, namely the use of the holy sacraments and the use of church discipline, which is a spiritual not corporal or temporal ministry.

Second, it is important for our neighbors to know that Christianity is not just another attempt to gain control over the lives of others under a pretense. They need to know that we are seeking their good, that we are not cheating by making arguments from sources of authority to which they grant no authority. For example, when we try to persuade our neighbors that it is right and good to stop killing babies in the womb, we do better to make arguments from the very same world that they can see and understand. One need not be a Christian to read a sonogram or to be asked to think logically about human development or about the physiological, psychological, and social consequences of killing infants. Will that logic succeed every time? No, but we are not seeking to establish heaven on earth. We understand, as Augustine did, that we live here in the city of man.⁷

We should show our mostly pagan neighbors that we are not after their money. Indeed, what we Christians want is to be left alone. We want to be able to educate our children as we see fit. We are not asking them to pay for our children’s Christian education, and we no longer wish to support a pagan education system that seeks to indoctrinate into children all manner of bizarre ideas about human sexuality and the nature of truth and reality.

As we engage our neighbors, the more we can show that we understand that we are discussing temporal matters—whether it is a zoning question, or how to pave a road, or whether to levy a new sales tax, or even for something as challenging as capital punishment—and we make arguments by appealing to public policy, to known facts, and to reason, we are much more likely to persuade them than if we start lobbing passages from Numbers into a committee meeting of the state legislature.

The question here is not whether it is right or wrong to appeal to Numbers or Deuteronomy in a city council or school board meeting, but whether it will be persuasive to people who no longer know what the Bible is and who lack the frame of reference to make sense of such an appeal. What will our pagan neighbors, who are now almost entirely ignorant of Christianity, make of such an appeal to what they are bound to regard as an arcane and even frightening text? Do we really want to turn a two-minute speech to the county board into an attempt to explain the relevance of the Pentateuch to civil life in 2024? We need to, as they say, read the room, and we need to signal that we understand what a city council meeting or even a Senate committee hearing is for: it is not to address ultimate matters but penultimate matters, temporal matters. One might argue from Scripture in an appeals court or a tax court, but one would probably be better off arguing from case law or tax law. We are not trying to establish a theocracy, but we are seeking to live, as Paul says, “a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way” (1 Tim 2:2).

Notes

1. St. Justin Martyr, St. Justin Martyr: The First and Second Apologies, ed. Walter J. Burghardt et al., trans. Leslie William Barnard, Ancient Christian Writers, vol. 56, (New York; Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1997), ch. 3 (p. 24).
2. F. L. Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), s.v., “Donatism.”
3. It is worth a note to observe that it was Constantine who convoked the Synod of Nicea in AD 325, which is problematic since neither nature nor Scripture gives the secular magistrate authority to convoke an ecclesiastical council (e.g., the Synod of Jerusalem, in Acts 15, was quite able to conduct itself without any help from the secular authorities).
4. Michael William Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, updated ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999), 541.
5. See John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.19.15, in any edition.
6. See “Resources On The Spirituality Of The Church.”
7. See R. Scott Clark, “Sub-Christian Nationalism? (Part 18).”

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• R. Scott Clark

  

  R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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