An Argument For Religious Establishment by Rev. Benjamin Glaser
To start out today I am going to make you read all of this:
“That all Kings and Princes at their coronation, and reception of their
princely authority, shall make their faithful promise by their solemn oath, in
the presence of the eternal God, that, enduring the whole time of their lives,
they shall serve the same eternal God, to the uttermost of their power,
according as he hath required in His most holy Word, contained in the Old and
New Testament; and according to the same Word shall maintain the true religion
of Christ Jesus, the preaching of His holy Word, the due and right ministration
of the sacraments now received and preached within this realm, (according to
the Confession of Faith immediately preceding) and shall abolish and
[withstand] all false religion contrary to the same; and shall rule the people
committed to their charge, according to the will and command of God revealed in
His foresaid Word, and according to the laudable laws and constitutions
received in this realm, nowise repugnant to the said will of the eternal God;
and shall procure, to the uttermost of their power, to the kirk of God, and
whole Christian people, true and perfect peace in all time coming: and that
they shall be careful to root out of their empire all heretics and enemies to
the true worship of God, who shall be convicted by the true kirk of God of the
foresaid crimes”.
If you made it this far, I commend you.
In a just and good world we would have heard King Charles III in recent days
repeat the above, but not seeking to allow the perfect to be the enemy of the
good I’ll take the language we have heard from the newest head royal of Britain
and others including the Honorable MP, Prime Minister Liz Truss in the past
couple of weeks since the death of her majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. Now, I am a
red-blooded American, a Marine Corps vet, and the descendant of a veteran of
the Battles of King’s Mountain and Cowpens and certainly hold no personal love
for the British Crown. I am a Republican (not necessarily in the party sense of
that word) through and through.
…HOWEVER…
What we have been witnessing is one of the blessings of Religious
Establishment. The otherwise non-religiously bound have been forced because of
the nature of the Established Church to use religiously pleasant language to
report the death of the Queen. That’s a good thing, and has nothing to do with
what form of government you happen to have. Samuel Rutherford laid the
groundwork for the American Revolution when he penned Lex, Rex. In that
book our forefather in the faith who had the intestinal fortitude to die in his
bed rather than be executed by tyrants gave rise to the whole idea of the
Constitution, rather than the King or the State, being the law of the land. Of
course in the United Kingdom that concept goes all the way back to Magna Carta.
The reason I mention all of that is because in a Covenanted nation with an
Established Church even rank unbelievers are made to give homage to the very
word of the living God, for it is the rule of faith and practice. An aside
worth exploring here is the way in which frontier Finneyism has obliterated a
right understanding of faith. Like 12th Century mystics evangelicals
have hoodwinked the world into thinking that Christianity is a personal religion,
an individual thing between you and God. Yet, when one examines Scripture and church
history you see that reducing the religion of Jesus into Buddhism is baloney. While
we certainly believe in regeneration of the particular human being through the
proclamation of the word there is sense in which Baptism, for an example, and
the signs of the Covenant, and the Table, point to something far more important
than Tom and Jane Believer. As I say all the time when teaching on Baptism we
don’t Baptize people into nothing. It’s why you can’t just take someone down to
the lake at camp and throw water on them and act like they’ve fulfilled all
righteousness. It is a corporate act encompassing a corporate representative
applying the corporate sign of membership into the corporate body. I know some people
will get the vapors when I say this, but Christianity is a Nationalistic
Religion. When our Lord speaks of unity in John 17 He means it. All the world
is to be Christian, it was never meant to be, and never should be, one option
out of dozens. Everyone should be a Christian. We certainly don’t get
there by the sword, but we won’t get there being all namby pamby about it
either. There is nothing wrong with being Sectarian when your sect is the right
one.
The heresy of rugged individualism might be popular in Westerns (peace be
upon them), but you need to prepare yourself to fall over and pass out at what
I am getting ready to say.
A Catholic Pope was right about something.
Pope Pius IX writing in the 1860s condemned what he called “Americanism”.
Without getting too deep into the weeds here what he meant by that was the growing
trend, largely found among American bishops, of an interest in defending disestablishmentarianism,
or for those lacking google, the separation of Church and State. The Antichrist
actually has a point. What he was rightly noting, while doing so from a
position of grossness, was the way in which Modernism had taken the idea of
identity and filleted it like a fish, reinventing how people saw themselves. As
a kid I always thought it silly to tell my classmates that they could be
whatever they wanted to be when they grew up. I wasn’t going to be an Astronaut
no matter how much I willed it. I was blind as a bat, unable to do basic math,
and claustrophobic. That ain’t happening. According to what Pope Pius IX was on
about it was just as moronic to think the two sons of oil (Zech. 4:14) could function
separately from one another. The Church and the State are both under the
Lordship of Jesus Christ and to act like one can just kind of “exist” separate
from the other is philosophically untenable. As Establishment was undermined in
Germany, France, and Spain the Church went with it. It wasn’t just
Schleiermacher’s feel good religion that gutted the Church on the Continent, it
was the people being told by their leaders that the priests of bureaucracy,
politicians, etc.. were to be the source of identity and hope.
How’d that work out? Seems like we had a century of hundreds of millions of
deaths.
As I wrap up on this the big picture question is who is going to be the god
of the State, because they are going to have one. The United States is no
different. Don’t be fooled. No one can actually be disestablished. Some deity
will take over the masthead which alone belongs to Jesus Christ. The State is
not an amoral being. They will teach some religion to their citizens.
The question is will we, as ‘Merica, have our politicians and statesmen
speaking the words of eternal life, or eternal death. What is going to be our
Book of Common Prayer? The Solemn League and Covenant or Saul Alinsky’s Rules
For Radicals? Karl Marx or the Apostle Paul?
Have a great Lord’s Day and enjoy your Sabbath Rest.