A Reformation Sunday Lecture by Scott Hatch

It is not hard to make the argument today that we need a new Reformation; the weakness of the Christian church and the evidence of overall moral decay and degradation is both self-evident and pervasive.  In the books of 1 and 2 Kings there is a leaden refrain that “The king did evil in the sight of the LORD and did not walk in the ways of his father David.”  This echoes the depressing refrain in the book of Judges that “There was no king in Israel and everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” In our own day, we see wars and crises abroad, violence and political dysfunction at home, and the moral bearings of our society dissolving.  First and Second Kings seem today all too apropos.

Deep frustration at the dysfunctional situation we are in has led some Christians to pessimistically conclude that the liberal democracy which has characterized the United States for the past 236 years is no longer sustainable.  Roman Catholic writers like Patrick Dineen, Adrian Vermeule, and Sohrab Ahmari are flirting with a return to “integralism,” a Catholic social teaching that holds the Catholic faith should be the basis for public law and public policy.  On the Protestant side, similar ideas are being expounded by thinkers like Stephen Wolfe and Doug Wilson, who are debating the merits of some kind of Christian Nationalism.  What these two perspectives have in common is a view that the separation of church and state, which found its most first and most definitive expression in the founding of the American Republic, has at best failed and possibly should not even have been tried at all.  The solutions put forth by these thinkers, while varied and often inchoate, also share an advocacy for a much closer affiliation between church and state than currently exists.

Others have made effective critiques of integralism and Christian Nationalism, and while I concur in the main with those critiques, my purpose here is not to add to them.  Rather, it is to remember how the Reformation laid the groundwork for the eighteenth-century separation of church and state in what I will call, the American Settlement.  There are good reasons why the American Founders separated the two that still hold wisdom for today.  In the contemporary debates of today, it seems that thinkers too often operate off of caricatures, cherry-pick from this history, or ignore it altogether.  If there is the possibly of revising the American Settlement, then it behooves us to know the tectonic factors that prompted it coming into being in the first place.  Admittedly, this is a vast topic, so my approach in what follows is to draw out four general themes that came out in the interactions between church and state in the Reformation, and then at the end to show how the American Settlement addresses these themes.

1. As Christians, our foremost goal must in be promoting the purity of true worship in God’s church ahead of trying to reform the beliefs or behaviors of society generally.

In discussions of reforming society, we tend not to think of worship as something that should be at the top of our agenda, but this was the focal point for the Protestant Reformers.  In 1544, on the eve of the Diet of Speyer, the Genevan reformer John Calvin wrote a treatise entitled, The Necessity of Reforming the Church, which was nominally was addressed to the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Charles V but in reality, was probably aimed at consolidating the Protestant Reform movement.  The Protestants had been divided between Germans in the north and Swiss in the south since 1529, when Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli disagreed at the Marburg Colloquy over their understanding of how Christ was present in the Eucharist.  The Schmalkaldic League, a defensive alliance of the German Protestant princes, was weak in the face of the powerful Charles V and needed encouragement to stand together and extract concessions from him.  Calvin’s treatise provided that encouragement by clearly and succinctly explaining that the heart of the Reformers’ demands was the reform and purification of the worship of God in the church.

Given all the challenges that existed at the time it may seem odd to consider the issue of right worship to be paramount among them, but it does make sense in how it brings together everything.  Why, for example, do we worship God?  For His glory (soli deo gloria) and because of the grace He extended to us in salvation (sola gratia).  How was that salvation obtained?  Soley through the work of Christ (solus Christus) which we lay hold of through faith alone (sola fide).  What is the right way to worship God?  As He has instructed us in His Word (sola Scriptura).  Biblically, the first four Commandments in the Decalogue are focused on the proper worship and honoring of God.  The duty we owe to God precedes the duty we owe to our neighbors.  As can be seen in the books of 1 & 2 Kings, false worship, religious syncretism, and idolatry starts a people on the path of societal unraveling.  This is because corruption of the worship of God results in a corruption of our understanding of who God is, the requirement He has for holiness, and the need for and nature of our salvation in Christ Jesus.  To focus on beliefs and behaviors without considering worship central is sterile.  There is a practical and a pastoral aspect to this as well.  Worship involves our heart, not just our head or our actions.  This takes us beyond seeing the Reformation merely as an intellectual matter about justification by faith alone or the five solas and goes to the core of the Christian life.

In our own day, for all the interest in changing the culture and for all the attention given to political or public theology, it seems that this view of the centrality of promoting pure worship seems to be conspicuously absent from the dialogue.  For many, worship is a matter of aesthetic taste—single style or mixed music selection, contemporary praise songs or traditional hymns, and so forth.  As such, those interested in a closer affiliation between the church and the state because of the moral degradation of our day see it as a sidebar issue.  Others—mostly confessionalists—who do see it as a central problem are often derided as being too wedded to mere traditionalism.  But if the Bible is right and worship really is central to the well-being of both God’s people and the societies that they live in—as the Reformers understood—then we need to reevaluate our priorities for reform in light of that.

2. Political leaders do not always have the same interests or ends as the church, even when they support a religious agenda.

In promoting reformation in the public sphere, wisdom requires Christians to realize there are limits to cooperation with magistrates.  In some cases, political leaders may support religious reform as part of a broader political game.  One can see this in the case of Frederick the Wise of Saxony, Martin Luther’s protector.  Frederick consistently resisted appeals of the Pope and others to turn over Martin Luther to their custody, and, indeed, after the Diet of Worms in 1521 Frederick’s men kidnapped Luther and took him into protective custody in Warburg Castle.  In some ways, Frederick was a loyal son of the Catholic Church: he personally had one of the largest collections of holy relics in Europe, which gave him a pious reputation, and potentially money-making capacity.  So why did he support and protect Luther?  Some degree of sympathy for Luther’s ideas certainly has to be in the mix of motivations, but other reasons contributed as well.  Frederick had a principled interest in defending Luther as one of his subjects being treated unfairly by Roman Catholic hierarchy.  Luther also was the most prominent professor at Frederick’s newly established University of Wittenberg, which was drawing attention and scholars to the city, bolstering its—and Frederick’s—prominence.  Most importantly, Frederick, like other German nobles had political frictions with the Roman papacy and resented its interference in German affairs; supporting Luther provided a justification for resisting Rome’s political machinations.

In other cases, the goal may be for the political leader to strengthen his or her own control.  One can see in the case of the English king Henry VIII and his successors.  Henry earned the title, “Defender of the Faith” from the Pope for his early criticism and opposition to Luther’s ideas, a title which English monarchs have retained to this day.  Henry, however, was only two generations away from a hard-fought civil war within England, and so his house risked becoming extinguished if he did not have a male heir.  When the Pope refused to grant Henry an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Henry declared himself the head of the English Church, thus beginning the English Reformation.  His sensibilities remained Catholic in practice.

When Henry’s daughter Elizabeth I acceded to the throne after the disastrous reign of her half-sister Mary, who had brutally persecuted Protestants, Protestants felt hopeful that not only would Protestantism be restored but that reform would move forward.  Many of the Puritans had been in exile during Mary’s reign and saw how thorough the reforms were in Calvin’s Geneva; they wanted to emulate that.  Elizabeth had Parliament pass an Act of Supremacy (1559) to reaffirm her position as head of the Anglican Church, but her religious policy did not go further than that, much to the frustration of the nascent Puritan movement.  The Puritans were again frustrated when James I acceded to the throne after Elizabeth.  James had been raised Presbyterian in Scotland and English reformers felt he would be sympathetic to having the Anglican Church be more reformed like the Church of Scotland.  James, however, liked controlling the episcopacy and calculated that reforms which could depose the bishops could also depose the king; in light of the subsequent English Civil War, his view proved to be prescient.

The fact that political leaders do not share the same interests or ends as the church is a truth worth being mindful of in our own day even though we do not have established churches.  Today, many politicians stoke populist outrage over the moral degradation that is around us, but once in office their willingness to resolve the issue prompting that outrage seems to dim considerably.  That is because fueling the outrage is good for fundraising and garnering votes; resolving those problems, however, would require expending potentially serious political capital which might impede their ability to get re-elected.  The incentives, then, work against actually addressing the problems.

3. Political leaders and their allies in the church have often suppressed true religion for their own ends, even to the point of backing heresy.

In 1 Kings, we see where Jeroboam I created a separate, idolatrous, religious system to enhance the separation between his northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah.  His goal was basically to use religion as a means of social control or at least to keep it quiescent and politically under control.  Two examples from among many are illustrative that the misuse of religion for political end existed in the Reformation and post-Reformation period as well.

In the mid-sixteenth century, Protestant ideas began making considerable headway France, especially among the nobility.  This created a political problem for the French crown, because it de facto challenged the king’s claims to absolute rule.  Rather than trying to find some accommodation with the Huguenots (the French Protestants), the crown instead initiated a harsh persecution.  The worst incident at the time was on August 24, 1572, St. Bartholomew’s Day, when a number of the Huguenot leaders were in Paris for the marriage of the Protestant, Henri of Navarre to the Catholic king’s daughter, Margarite de Valois.  Catherine de Medici, the Queen Mother, along with other royalists, initiated a massacre of the Huguenots, purportedly in defense of the Catholic faith.  Within Paris alone, as many as 3,000 people were killed and estimates go as high as 70,000 for the number of Huguenots who died nationwide.  The massacre touched off 30 years of religious warfare in France.

England, too, suffered because of the misuse of religion.  After James I’s death in 1625, his son Charles I ascended to the crown and Charles appointed one of his favorites, William Laud, to be archbishop of Canterbury, a position from which Laud oversaw the entire Anglican Church.  Both Charles and Laud were insistent on adding extra-biblical and unbiblical elements to worship over the objections of many Puritans.  Moreover, at the same time, they were willing to tolerate and accept Arminian clergy in the Church of England because such individuals supported their worship innovations.  Arminianism had been deemed heretical in 1618-19 at the Synod of Dort in Holland, an international Reformed synod to which James had sent legates and accepted its rulings.  Tensions broke in 1636 when the crown tried to impose a revised Book of Common Prayer on the Scots, who saw this as a deliberate affront on their understanding of true and acceptable worship of God.  The Scots went into revolt against the crown, followed a few years later by many English.  The result was the English Civil War (also known as the War of the Three Kingdoms [England, Scotland, and Ireland]), which would lead ultimately to the execution of Charles I and a dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell.  With the restoration of the king under Charles II in 1660, the gains of English and Scottish Presbyterianism were erased by a restored Anglican hierarchy that neither forgot nor forgave their earlier loss of stature.  Reformed pastors and teachers, now officially called Dissenters or Non-Conformists, would continue to be persecuted by the crown until 1689, when a measure of toleration was extended to them after the Glorious Revolution.

Given the degree to which church and state were intertwined during the Reformation and post-Reformation periods, the question of what constituted the true religion rather than a false religion inevitably became a political question, often leading, as we have seen, to bitter armed conflict.  Among conservative Christians today who are flirting with ideas of integralism or Christian Nationalism there is a tendency to describe “Christian” in more generic terms, so as to be inclusive and not specifically sectarian, but it cannot really sidestep issues of sectarianism in practice.  The fundamental problem is determining where and on what basis to draw the line as to what is right and wrong, what is permissible and impermissible.  This cannot really be avoided and once one begins drawing lines, then some degree of sectarianism is inevitable.  This was a problem in the Reformation, and for us today as well.

Reformed Christians do have an epistemological standard to address this question of drawing lines, namely Scripture.  This is not mere proof-texting, but they insisted on asking the question, “Is there a positive warrant in Scripture to claim that something is essential to faith or worship?”  Using this biblical standard, Reformed Christians rightly found much in Roman Catholic teaching and practice to be idolatrous.  For this reason, they could not in good conscience take a “big tent” approach and thereby overlook significant substantive differences for the sake of some nebulous sense of “Christendom” or “Christian unity.”

The Reformed approach stands in contrast to that of other Protestants, who felt that the absence of a negative sanction was sufficient to justify deeming a matter to be essential to faith or worship.  The difference is subtle but important.  The former standard is narrower but sounder, whereas the latter opens the door to much subjectivity.  We see this problem even today as theological progressives have increasingly relativized doctrines of the historic Christian faith to accommodate worldly preferences, whether they be things like the atonement or like traditional Christian sexual morality.  In practice, without an objective standard subjectivity boils down essentially to a power issue more so than a doctrinal one.  One can see this in the examples just provided, but it is also true for the modern period as well.  This year, for example, we commemorate the 100^th anniversary of J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism, and that brings to mind the account of how Machen was forced out of the Presbyterian Church USA in 1936.  In Machen’s case, PCUSA leaders railroaded his excommunication trial, denying him even the opportunity to testify in his own defense.  Their actions said in effect “We’re right because we are in power, and you are heretical because you disagree with us.” Many PCUSA leaders rationalized this by falsely claiming that Madchen was temperamentally argumentative, without any acknowledgement of the merits of the concerns he had been putting forth.

4. From a political perspective, any sustained religious reform efforts have to navigate some real dangers.

It would be easy to look back on the Reformation and assume and assume an air of inevitability, without appreciating the tenuousness facing the Reformers and their heirs.  It was inevitable in the sense that God in His Providence brought to pass what actually happened, but if we look at the circumstances the Reformers faced through their eyes, we realize that they could not and did not assume that everything would work out for them.  They understood the fragility of what they were undertaking.  Looking back with hindsight we can see that there are at least three dangers which the Reformers faced and which we need to be mindful of even in our own day.

First, there is the topography of power.  In a more nuanced discussion than I can do justice to here, Roland Bainton, in his book, The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, draws out how political centralization or decentralization either impeded or facilitated the spread of Reformation ideas.  In looking at Europe at the time, the region now constituting Germany was a collection of over 400 kingdoms, duchies, baronies, and free cities.  No one had any centralized control over this region, so it is not surprising—especially in light of the frictions that German leaders had with Rome—that there would be places where Protestant ideas could find safehaven.  To the east, the vast lands of Poland and Lithuania showed some interest in Protestant ideas, but the nascent level of national institutions meant that it would be difficult for such ideas to take root in a lasting way, as proved to be the case in how the Counter-Reformation was able to reclaim them back into the Catholic fold.  To the west—namely, Spain, France, and England—state power was becoming more consolidated, and those countries could legitimately claim to be the first modern nation states.  In Spain, the Reformation never took hold.  In 1492 the Spanish were finally able to expel the Muslims from Granada, their last stronghold in Iberia, marking the culmination of a 700-year Reconquista against the Muslims.  The Catholic Church supported Spain throughout the Reconquista, and Spain repaid the Church by being a loyal son well into the twentieth century.  In France, as already noted, Huguenot sentiment flourished for a time among the nobility.  As the most centralized state in Europe and given the intertwining of state and church, it also is not surprising that it would be in France where the Reformation would meet its most serious opposition.  As for England, it was less centralized than either France or Spain and its Reformation longer and messier than either of those states.  The lesson that this diversity suggests for us today is to be wary of a “one-size-fits-all” theory of church-state relations to guide our own efforts at religious reform.  America today is nearly the size of Europe, with a tremendous diversity of its own.  Religious reform will differ widely between states.  On the one hand, there are states centralized and left-leaning state governments like California and Massachusetts, and on the other hand, states with more limited governments or attitudes favorable to Christianity, such as Alabama or Texas, along with all sorts of variations in between.  As the COVID-19 pandemic showed a few years ago, churches will face different situations and will need to find their own way forward in their local circumstances.

Second, there is the problem of identity politics intertwining with religion and the church.  Looking back on the Reformation there is little doubt that most of the warfare that characterized the period was due to the fusion of church, state, and national identity.  To cite but one example, English national identity in the early modern period sought unity in the crown, Parliament, and a Protestant Church of England.  Religiously, the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible were icons of national identity, alongside John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which highlighted the depravations English Protestants experienced under Queen Mary.  In any predominantly Christian country such a mixture of religion, state, and national identity will be inevitable.  What makes the combination potentially toxic is when religion becomes the handmaiden to the other forms of identity.  This is not merely a patriotic sense among Christians of wanting the well-being of the nation they are part of; it would be the manifestation of the attitude that “God is on our side because of who we are.”  This ties the moral credibility of the church to the success or failure of the state, and that can seriously compromise the church’s witness.  Such a prideful sentiment is likely to trump the skepticism the Christian faith has towards tribalism, the injunctions against self-righteousness, and the commands which our Lord Jesus Christ gives to love our neighbors.  If the church remains faithful to Christ, it will necessarily and naturally feel tension between being faithful to Him and being good citizens in this country.  If it does not feel that, then that should trigger some self-examination.

Lastly, there is the problem of disillusionment and exhaustion that people will have in times when the church has been caught up in the politicization of the age.  For the 172 years from the time that Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg until the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89, Europe had been convulsed with reformation, revolution, and war.  It is hard for us now to emotionally comprehend the degree of change and the level of psychological exhaustion which set in among the people.  Periods of warfare, especially warfare bound up with religion, typically open the door to greater secularization, and the period of warfare of the seventeenth century was no exception.  By the mid-seventeenth century, philosophers, scholars, and theologians were moving in directions to deemphasize the religious foundations of society.  That trend would continue throughout the eighteenth century, breaking into an outright rejection of religion after 1789 after the French Revolution.  This is the world that created our world of today and the church needs to be sensitive to the fact that the more politically active it is, the most likely that it will see the backlash directed against it.  Although the past two decades of counter-terrorism wars do not approach the scale of the religious warfare of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one can still sense an exhaustion with religion today.

In bringing this discussion to a close, we need to circle back to the beginning, namely the disillusionment with the separation of church and state and the American Settlement.

The American Founding Fathers were heirs to the Reformation.  Their views on the separation of church and state were not a theoretical secularist experiment, but the result of long historical experience.  The United States, indeed, was the first Western country to embark on a course of formally separating church and state when it ratified the US Constitution in 1787.  As the Founders understood it, the separation was intended to protect the church from the intrusions of the government, but in the twentieth century that has become increasingly interpreted as keeping religion and religious discussion out of the public sphere altogether.  This shift is indeed important, and in my opinion, wrong, but we do not fix it by throwing out the American Settlement altogether.  We fix it by going back to an originalist understanding of what it meant to begin with.

The American Settlement in many ways addresses the lessons given here from the Reformation period.  By making church and formally separate, it allows the church the freedom to promote the purity of worship without (as many) complications posed by political leaders with alternative agendas or who are trying to manipulate religion to be a means of social or political control.  It allows for the church to adjust to the disparities power and culture across regions by refraining from a one-size-fits all approach.  It also allows the church room to speak prophetically to society and to stand apart from the political verities of the age.  This space can also be useful for the church for self-reflection and renewal.  The advantages of the American Settlement have made the United States a paradox in the Western world: although the United States does not have any established church or even a preferred church, yet at the same time the country has one of the highest rates of religious affiliation and participation anywhere in the developed world.

That said, the American Settlement is by no means perfect.  The space that it gives to the church needs to be actually utilized by the church for the ends of promoting purity of worship and the expansion of the Gospel.  If the church instead seeks worldly influence and temporal goals, then it will squander these opportunities.  Moreover, as we have increasingly seen over the past few decades, the instinctive desire of political leaders to control or manipulate religion remains unabated and needs to be restrained.  Such control and manipulation can be manifested either in efforts to coopt Christianity or exhibit hostility toward it—and sometimes both simultaneously.  In the past few decades, the legal basis for religious liberty has become better enshrined in law today more so than at any point in the history of the Republic.  To throw out the American Settlement is likely to reopen the problems that existed prior to its creation, and which were extant during the Reformation.  A better course, in my opinion, would be to retain the American Settlement, all the while strengthening it and fixing it.